Following the hugely negative fallout from the annulled August 8 Kenyan general election, vis-à-vis the relevance of the role of Observer Missions, former Mahama Deputy Education Minister Samuel Okudzeto-Ablakwa, predictably, decided to go to bat for his former boss and the man who is widely believed by many Ghanaians to have led a Commonwealth observer delegation to Nairobi, the Kenyan capital, with the sole and express purpose of helping his well-known bosom friend and incumbent President Uhuru Kenyatta rig the election. I am here, of course, referring to Mr. Mahama himself, not the rest of the members of the Commonwealth’s Observer Mission as a whole (See “Ablakwa Writes: On Developments in Kenya and Why the Vicious Attacks on Mahama Are Most Unfair” MyJoyOnline.com 9/4/17).
Those of us who have read the quizzically passionate defense of Ghana’s former President by the National Democratic Congress’ Member of Parliament for North-Tongu/Tongu-North Constituency, in the country’s Volta Region, would perfectly agree with the author of this very column that Mr. Okudzeto-Ablakwa ends up, clearly inadvertently, vindicating the belief of those of us who have been studiously following political events on the ground in Ghana, since at least 2011, the lead-up to Ghana’s Election 2012, that Mr. Mahama had the incontrovertible intention of helping his equally wily “Kenyan Brother” literally take the electorate of that most economically powerful East African country for a ride.
But before we delve into the details of Mr. Okudzeto-Ablakwa’s melodramatically trenchant defense of his former boss, it is worth underscoring the fact that in the wake of Ghana’s 2012 general, Mr. Johnson Asiedu-Nketia, the longtime General-Secretary of the then-ruling National Democratic Congress, categorically stated in a radio interview that it was not that the Presidential Candidate of his own political had won the election, but that it was the woeful lack of vigilance on the part of then-President Mahama’s main challenger and political opponent, to wit, then-Candidate Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo, as well as the latter’s polling representatives and assigns, that had enabled the implicitly undeserved electoral victory of Mr. Mahama to be scandalously realized.
In his patently at once grotesque and farcical defense of his former boss, Mr. Okudzeto-Ablakwa fatuously decries the perfectly legitimate and morally justifiable annulment of Kenya’s August 8 election on grounds that the estimated expenditure involved in running the shambolic election, of $ 500 million, was far too expensive to be “so stunningly” annulled in the name of justice and fair play. No such defense could be more insulting to the intelligence of the Kenyan electorate and the rest of civilized humanity at large. Mr. Okudzeto-Ablakwa, who serves as the Ranking Member on the Ghanaian Parliament’s Foreign Affairs Committee, also puerilely provides a farcical dry-run of a comparative analysis between the cost of Kenya’s August 8 general election with those of several other African countries, including Rwanda, Tanzania, Ghana and, for good measure, Papua New Guinea, and concludes that the forensically proven hacking of the Kenyan election, the relatively most expensive of its kind on the African continent and, indeed, around the globe, ought to have been allowed to stand!
But even more outrageously, the Tongu-North NDC-MP would have the overwhelming majority of Ghanaian citizens blindly exult in the selection of Mr. Mahama as Head of the Commonwealth’s Observer Mission because, somehow, such selection affirms the “enviable democracy credentials” of Ghana. Maybe somebody levelheaded had better recall for the benefit and moral edification of Mr. Okudzeto-Ablakwa, the grossly incompetent and flagrantly shambolic proceedings of the William Atuguba-presided Supreme Court panel that heard the Akufo-Addo et al. V. Mahama and the National Democratic Congress’ 2012 Presidential-Election Petition.
In the latter case scenario, we know, for instance, that at least a couple of the Ghanaian Apex Court’s associates on the Atuguba panel had had their decisions bizarrely altered without their consent and then reversed several times. But what bears taking into account, more than all else, is the pathologically cynical mindset of Mr. Okudzeto-Ablakwa who, by the way, bitterly and self-righteously accuses the members of Ghana’s political opposition of grossly erring in not unreservedly and “patriotically” backing a routine judicial practice of rubberstamping rigged or stolen elections all over the world, but instead choosing to “curiously” side with Kenya’s Chief Justice David Maraga and the Kenyan Supreme Court.
Needless to say, Mr. Okudzeto-Ablakwa’s Ghana is not what most of us bona fide native Ghanaian citizens bargained for in the bloody battle against the erstwhile Rawlings dictatorship, of which, by the way, Mr. Okudzeto-Ablakwa was a firebrand “Young Pioneer.”
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