Opinion: Is the Christian Council Now Owned by the NDC? – By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.

The writer, Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jnr., Ph.D.

I ask the question that makes up the title of this column because in presuming to heartily congratulate Mrs. Jean Adukwei Mensah, the dynamic and astute Executive-Secretary of the Institute for Economic Affairs (IEA), for being recently sworn in as Ghana’s Electoral Commissioner, Mr. Cyril Fayose, the General-Secretary of the Christian Council of Ghana (CCG), actually launched an unctuously vitriolic attack on the new Electoral Commission’s Chairperson by mischievously suggesting that, somehow, Mrs. Charlotte Kesson-Smith Osei, the former EC Chairperson, had been illegitimately removed from office. Mr. Fayose described the dismissal of Mrs. Osei as the EC’s Chairperson as rather “unfortunate”.

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If he had bothered to find out that the 1992 Constitution did not allow then-President John Dramani Mahama to transfer Mrs. Osei from the National Commission for Civic Education (NCCE), where the latter was the Chairperson, to the EC, Mr. Fayose, whose last name sounds like a Nigerian of Yoruba ethnicity, would not have made such an inexcusably scandalous remark. Or maybe the General-Secretary of the Christian Council of Ghana simply did not care. I deliberately draw attention to the fact that Mr. Fayose’s surname is not traditionally known to be affiliated with any indigenous Ghanaian ethnic group, because we have also been given to understand, at least by Mr. Osei Kyei Mensah-Bonsu, the Parliamentary Majority Leader, that Mrs. Osei’s own biological mother is a bona fide Nigerian; and also, that her birth or biological father is half-Ghanaian and half-Sierra Leonean.

Unless Mr. Fayose was reading the deliberate – in legal parlance – and legitimate removal from the EC through the colored lenses of either tribalism (ethnocentrism) or micro-nationalism, it ought to feel strange to any critical thinker how the General-Secretary of the Christian Council arrived at the conclusion that, somehow, Mrs. Osei had an inalienable right to hold onto her position as EC Chair in perpetuity. Such trend of ratiocination is nothing short of downright absurd. And just what does the Christian Council’s Mr. Fayose mean when he wistfully says that “Sometimes as Ghanaians, we tend to rubbish all that a person has done because of one little spot on his or her profile”? Does the criminal defiance of the Supreme Court of Ghana, as Mrs. Osei persistently did as EC Chairperson, constitute one of those “little spots” on the résumé of the ousted EC Chief?

You see, were the ministration of justice as sound and robust as it ought to be, Mrs. Osei would already be behind bars. I don’t think for a split-second that Mr. Fayose even quarter-, let alone half-, appreciates the dastardly attempt by Mrs. Osei to unconscionably corrupt Ghanaian democracy, right from her criminal decision to summarily remove Ghana’s Coat-of-Arms, with the equally criminal complicity of then-President Mahama, by replacing the same with the mandala-looking stolen artistic and/or intellectual property of a Turkish organization whose operatives sued the Mahama government and won an undisclosed amount in settlement of the same.

You see, in presuming to admonish the new EC’s boss, whose guts, as it were, Mr. Fayose clearly cannot stand, by brazenly implying that, somehow, the new EC’s boss would be criminally poised to calling Election 2020 in favour of the ruling New Patriotic Party (NPP), Mr. Fayose not only inexcusably insults the intelligence of Mrs. Mensa but, even more significantly, what the General-Secretary of the CCG unmistakably seems to be implying is that as EC Chair, Mrs. Osei engaged in the routine and flagrant habit of rigging elections in favour of the then-ruling National Democratic Congress. No wonder Christians and Christianity have been receiving a bad rap in Ghana these days.

*Visit my blog at: kwameokoampaahoofe.wordpress.com  Ghanaffairs

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