I don’t know how in Satan’s Hell he managed to hoodwink the people of the Tamale-Central Constituency into voting to send him to represent their needs, interests and aspirations in our National Assembly or Parliament House in Accra. But one thing is crystal clear, the constituents of Tamale-Central did not get half their money’s worth. And to think that this man who shows absolutely no sense of his national identity could hold several cabinet portfolios is rather shameful. It makes one wonder why s/he should or ought to feel proud to belong to the same country with Mr. Inusah Fuseini. You see, I tend to believe that Ghanaian parliamentarians are among the most enlightened of their kind around the globe. But hearing Alhaji Inusah Fuseini question the right of the current Chairperson of Ghana’s Electoral Commission (GEC), Mrs. Jean Adukwei Mensah, to do right by the country’s 1992 Constitution, by legitimately having the EC revert to the use of the statutorily mandated EC logo or our National Coat-of-Arms, makes me want to throw up. It is nothing short of the criminally scandalous and patently absurd.
You see, what the National Democratic Congress’ Member of Parliament for Tamale-Central is implying here is that the choice of what logo represents the most significant institutional representation of the sovereignty of Ghanaian citizens, our franchise, was the personal and especial prerogative of Mrs. Charlotte Kesson-Smith Osei, the Mahama-appointed former Chairperson of the Electoral Commission (EC). In a more effectively and culturally attuned constitutional democracy, Charlotte Osei would be serving time in prison for attempting to overthrow the government. In legal and practical terms, this was what challenging the insignia of the Electoral Commission meant without the express approval of Parliament. And she would have been serving time with the megalomaniacal narcissist who appointed her to the job, to wit, Mr. John Dramani Mahama. And if Parliament had approved of the treasonous behavior of the former EC Chairperson, then what this eerily means is that the wrong people and characters are in charge of our august House and deliberative representation of our sovereignty. And as Ghanaian citizens, we must be one heck of an incurably miserable lot.
We may also, all of us, especially our so-called Honorables, be in dire need of an immediate and thorough psychiatric examination. That he may be deeply troubled psychologically, and that is being extremely reserved about the same, has never been hidden from my critical purview. If his inexcusably silly call for an unqualified apology for Mrs. Charlotte Osei from the leaders of the New Patriotic Party had come from a much younger and less experienced parliamentarian, I would have excused such codswallop, but in this case such ridiculous call happens to be coming from a politician who came of age at just about the same time as yours truly. You see, while I was growing up in the late 1960s and early 1970s, in both primary and middle schools, we had a course or subject called History & Civics, which dealt with both knowledge about some of the most significant people who fiercely fought and laid down their very lives in order to make us the proud Ghanaians that he had, nearly each and every one of us, been brought up to feel and even take for granted by our parents and grandparents. Sometimes, History & Civics was neatly separated into History and Civics, although even our teachers did not seem to be quite certain about where the “history” ended, and the “civics” took over or vice versa.
Today, civics appears to have been collapsed and transformed into something called “Social Studies,” which clearly appears to be far less well focused than the traditional civics courses which primarily dealt with citizenship rights and responsibilities. The man who is widely credited with both the canonical establishment and institutional or pedagogical dissemination of the curricular contents of civics is Dr. Kofi Abrefa Busia, soon to be Prime Minister of Ghana. As Head of the National Commission for Civic Education (NCCE), the former main Opposition Leader and inveterate political opponent of President Kwame Nkrumah saw the acute awareness of one’s societal responsibilities and the need to staunchly fight for one’s civil and human rights, precisely what the Nkrumah-led Convention People’s Party (CPP) regime had rudely denied the overwhelming majority of Ghanaian citizens, as the most significant feature or constitutional element of what made any Ghanaian citizen worth his/her designation as such.
You see, when Mrs. Charlotte Osei was quoted as smugly and narcissistically saying that: “That is our new logo. We liked it, we picked it and it makes us happy,” the former EC’s Chair was not referring to our body politic or Ghanaian citizens. Rather, in synch with her characteristic proprietary arrogance, Mrs. Osei was referring to the Three Commissioners of the EC, including herself, who had literally ridden roughshod over the other majority of Four Commissioners of the EC who had, we are reliably informed, dissented from such sophomoric, albeit patently criminal, expression of narcissism.
For Charlotte Osei, plagiaristically “re-branding” the EC simply meant making the latter establishment the bona fide private property of the key operatives of the Mahama-led regime of the National Democratic Congress. This is inescapably the reason why Mr. Fuseini finds it extremely difficult to appreciate the legal and symbolic significance of our National Coat-of-Arms. But what is even more disturbing is the fact that like Mrs. Osei, Mr. Fuseini is also a professionally trained lawyer. And you begin to wonder what our law schools teach citizens like Mr. Fuseini and Mrs. Osei these days.
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