The globally infamous cross-dresser and General-Secretary of Ghana’s ruling National Democratic Congress (NDC) must be living in a fool’s paradise to cynically suppose that the Buhari electoral upset that occurred in Nigeria’s 2015 Presidential Election cannot be reprised in Ghana’s Election 2016 (“Buhari’s Victory: NPP Deluding Themselves With False Hopes – NDC” Starrfmonline.com / Ghanaweb.com 4/1/15).
To be certain, the “Buhari Quatrofecta Magic” has a far greater chance of happening in Ghana than it did in Nigeria, its geopolitical provenance. Needless to say, it is in no way being suggested here that Ghanaians and/or West Africans ought to heartily celebrate the fiercely fought and admittedly hard-won victory of the former extortionate junta leader. Rather, it is to remind the wiry and devious man popularly called General Mosquito that it was Mr. Johnson Asiedu-Nketia himself who, in the wake of the scandalous 2012 Ghanaian Presidential Election, sheepishly observed that but for the abject lack of vigilance on the part of New Patriotic Party (NPP) polling agents and their assigns and/or representatives, there was absolutely no was for the now-President John Dramani Mahama to have been declared the winner.
In the wake of Maj.-Gen. (Rtd.) Muhammadu Buhari’s resounding victory in Nigeria’s Election 2015, the Chief Justice of the most populous fledgling African democracy issued what clearly appeared to be an oblique admonishment to Ghana’s main opposition leader, Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo; and it was tersely that all elections must be won and declared as such at the polling station and by the Electoral Commission, and not by the Supreme Court, as outrageously occurred here in the United States in 2000, in what became globally known as Gore v. Bush. It may well have been this bad precedent from the world’s most powerful nation that inspired Ghana’s former Attorney-General and Justice Minister to seek redress from the pathologically bumbling Wood-presided Supreme Court of Ghana.
Of course, several factors coalesced into clinching presidential victory for Gen. Buhari who was running for the fourth time around and had in the past petitioned the Federal Supreme Court of Nigeria, unsuccessfully, for the redressing of what the now-72-year-old former military dictator then termed as flagrant electoral irregularities. Going for his third shot at the presidency come December 2016, Nana Akufo-Addo may be expected to have learned enough to enable him to galvanize his polling agents, supporters and sympathizers into ensuring that the New Patriotic Party, as well as the suffering majority of Ghanaian voters, is not wickedly taken for a ride once more.
It is also quite obvious that Mr. Asiedu-Nketia was alluding to the abject lack of cohesiveness and vigilance on the part of adherents and sympathizers of the Danquah-Busia-Dombo Traditionalists, when he cautioned his party’s main rivals and political opponents on the need not to be deceived into facilely presuming that the Buhari Magic could also precipitate in Ghana’s Election 2016.
Well, it is more apt to reverse his shambolic rhetoric by warning General Mosquito and his associates that any attempt to primitively and barbarically reverse the all-too-healthy clock of Ghanaian democracy will be fiercely met with swift justice on the streets, homes and alleyways of the country, in much the same manner that the spokesperson for President-Elect Buhari’s All-Progressives’ Congress (APC) cautioned the resoundingly vanquished President Goodluck Ebele Azikiwe Jonathan.
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