Folks, we continue our assessment of the NPP’s position regarding preparations for election 2016 to pose serious questions on whether the NPP is either ready for or interested in doing anything for election 2016 to be conducted by the EC in Ghana.
We do so on the basis of the evidence that the NPP itself has given us. Here are additional issues to drive our arguments.
1. Wolf -crying over technicalities
The major cog in the NPP’s wheel of acrimony has been the voters register. The party has wasted much time, money, and energy to paint the wrong picture that Ghana’s electoral roll is so bogus as not to be accepted for election 2016. They have done everything with their useless petition against election 2012 to create that impression and have stood their ground to defend everything, even though they haven’t succeeded in providing any concrete evidence to back their wolf-crying.
What Dr. Bawumia did with the fictitious voters registers of Ghana and Togo, a kind of criminal venture that should have sent him to jail, is just an inkling into the perfidy surrounding all that the NPP stands for at Election 2016.
Also to be noticed is the NPP’s wailing over a so-called bloating of the voters register as a result of the National Health Insurance card that the EC used to register voters for Election 2012. After succeeding in using their surrogates to get the Supreme Court to force the EC to annul such registrants’ eligibility on that score and to re-register them (which the EC has complied with), the NPP is out again complaining to high heaven that the exercise was fraught with malpractices. What at all do these NPP people think they know that other Ghanaians don’t?
2. Announcement of electoral results
The latest in the NPP’s long list of protests is that the NPP is not happy with moves by the Electoral Commission (EC) to choose the electronic transmission of results for the December 7 polls.
(See http://www.ghanaweb.com/GhanaHomePage/NewsArchive/NPP-raises-concern-over-e-transmission-of-polls-results-459367).
We point out here that the NPP raised dust over a so-called electronic transmission of the results of Election 2012, causing needless tension as it accused the STL (an Israeli company ion Dzorwulu, Accra) of conniving with the EC to manipulate the situation to the NDC’s advantage.
Much chaos resulted from this baseless accusation. In the end, the NPP lost because the EC hadn’t done anything with that company. Everything came from the EC’s own “Strong Room”, where the NPP was strongly represented by the late Jake Obetsebi-Lamptey and the now-emasculated Kwabena Agyepong.
The rub here is that the NPP has no constitutional prerogative to determine how the EC should do things as far as the electoral process is concerned. By coming out to confront the system, the NPP is giving a very bad signal to the country and the voters. We have on record what the NPP plans to do, which is alarming but manageable if the incumbent can use the apparatus of state judiciously to secure Ghana’s interest and not a partisan one (even ignominiously favouring himself).
Ghana’s democracy must grow and serve useful purposes to improve living standards, not to uphold any quaint dream of heirloom.
That is why the NPP’s insistence on announcing what it considers to be the results of Election 2016 won’t cut butter. Can it announce what is not recorded and hope to gain from it? What sort of political mischief is that? Peter Mac Manu has already told us that the NPP will set up its own machinery for announcing the results of the elections without recourse to whatever the EC has in place. Clearly, then, we are given to know what is up the NPP’s sleeves. But that isn’t the key to unlock the doors of power.
The NPP can do whatever it wishes to do, but it won’t succeed in overturning the outcome of the elect6ions because whatever is recorded at each polling station will be known to the voters. And I trust that the voters will act speedily to protect and defend their franchise and electoral decisions. They will know everything at the local level and react appropriately when the outcome is announced.
That is where the trouble lies for the NPP because if it announces anything to the contrary to suit its malignant political agenda, it will provoke the voters. And the voters know that any result that runs counter to their genuine electoral decision in the polling booth is nothing but a recipe for disaster. They will react as such. What do we expect, then? Chaos and nothing but chaos!! Is that what the NPP is looking for as a means to put Akufo-Addo in power?
Where we stand
We are guided by the fact that elections are won at the polls and not anywhere else, which explains why we have been insisting all this while that those fixat6ed on mere technicalities have already lost the battle. Of course, the technicalities matter as far as conducting the elections is concerned; but they end where the voters’ frir4st step toward the ballot box begins.
In the ballot box, the voter doesn’t care about those technicalities once he or she can be verified as a genuine voter and ushered on to thumb-print the ballot paper for his or her preferred candidate. At that moment, the voter won’t bat an eyelid over who is the Chair of the EC or whether the placement of the candidates on the ballot paper is worthwhile. It will all boil down to who prefers whom. Technicalities will fly out of the ballot box.
Why does the NPP think that it must call the shots? Clearly, there is a misguided mentality here, which reinforces the apprehension and disdain that voters have for such a political cause. Those wrapped up in themselves this way won’t win voter support.
They can do all they want to—including militarizing their cause—but they will be brushed aside and clamped down heavily on if they go beyond bounds. Can Akufo-Addo and his gang see what we have seen ahead of them? I wonder; I truly wonder.
I shall return…
Writer’s e-mail: mjbokor@yahoo.com
