I intend to deal with Mr. Mahama’s vehement denial that, indeed, he deliberately colluded with Dr. Kwadwo Afari-Gyan to rig Election 2012 in a separate article.
Anyway, in the aforesaid interview granted Citi-Fm Radio by the general-secretary of the ruling National Democratic Congress (NDC), and poignantly captured in the caption of this article, Mr. Asiedu-Nketia categorically called for the summary annulment of the results of any polling stations whose presiding officers were confirmed to have permitted voters to cast their ballots without biometric verification.
Interestingly, when he pompously and pontifically mounted the witness-box barely a week ago, the gaunt personality affectionately nicknamed “General Mosquito” vehemently insisted to the Atuguba-presided court hearing the Akufo-Addo/New Patriotic Party (NPP) Election 2012 presidential petition that, in fact, absolutely no voting had been allowed at any polling station in the country without biometric verification.
In laity terms, the preceding is called a factual contradiction. In other words, it is logically incongruous for the NDC general-secretary to, on the one hand, call for the summary annulment of the polling results of any polling station where voting was allowed to proceed without biometric verification by polling officials and then, on the other hand, assert imperiously from the witness-box in the Atuguba-presided court to Mr. Philip Addison, counsel for the petitioners, that he, Mr. Asiedu-Nketia, has absolutely no knowledge about the penalty exacted for biometrically unverified voting. In legal and judicial parlance, such deliberate and willful testimonial contradiction is called PERJURY.
Looked at another way, Mr. Asiedu-Nketia swore an oath to tell the Atuguba Court nothing but the unvarnished truth, “so help me God,” and then criminally violated his oath by lying before officers of the highest court of the land. In most civilized democratic national cultures, PERJURY is a felony punishable by a prison sentence or jail term. It is not clear whether, in fact, the NDC general-secretary fully appreciates the significance of the crime which he just committed before the highest court of the land.
At any rate, whether he willfully or inadvertently perjured himself is beside the point. For, as the age-old maxim goes: “Ignorance of the law is no excuse”; more so when one is a prominent political figure like Mr. Johnson Asiedu-Nketia, and also President John Dramani Mahama, of course!
I am indescribably elated that finally, the petitioners are fast homing in by using the humongous corpus of unguarded media testimony of the respondents against the latter, as I had on occasion admonished several times in the recent past. What Mr. Addison so deftly succeeded in doing with the incontrovertible media testimony of Mr. Asiedu-Nketia’s is called a JUDICIAL-JUJITSU, that is, letting the unconscionable prevaricator literally stew in his own brine.
Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D. Department of English Nassau Community College of SUNY Garden City, New York
E-mail: okoampaahoofe@optimum.net
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