It is quite fascinating to hear Rashid Tanko Computer, the Deputy Director of Elections and Information Technology (EIT) for the ruling Government of the National Democratic Congress (NDC) stridently accuse the leadership of the country’s main opposition New Patriotic Party (NPP) of “Killing Ghana’s Democracy,” solely on grounds of the fact of the NPP’s having clinched a measly 38.2-percent of the total certified valid votes of the 2024 General Election (See “ ‘NPP Killed Ghana’s Democracy’ – NDC’s Rashid Tanko Claps Back at ‘Democracy Under Attack’ Demo” Modernghana.com 8/6/26).
The reality that panned out on the ground, however, was totally different, as many of us avid and studious watchers of the entire electoral process of the country’s last election of December 7, 2024 may vividly recall. Now, who did not witness, with horror, the NDC’s former Propaganda Secretary, presently renamed National Information Officer, Mr. Samuel “Sammy” Gyamfi, flanked by the party’s National Chairman, Mr. Johnson “The Mosquito” Asiedu-Nketia, rally “all able-bodied party hoodlums and thugs” on live television and urge the latter gang of democracy saboteurs to besiege and swamp all the hundreds and thousands of ballot-collation centers around the country, when only officially designated party representatives were statutorily permitted to do so?
I mean, these designated party representatives were officially not mandated to either “besiege” or “swamp” the various collation centers around the country, but expressly to studiously observe the voting counting and collation and, in some instances, the recounting process. Now, it goes without saying that if, indeed, Mr. Tanko Computer were really interested in the critical question of who actually attempted to “Kill” Ghana’s Fourth Republican Democratic Culture, he have promptly referenced the globally reported and publicized criminal cannibalization and the wanton and downright bestial destruction of ballot boxes; or better yet, the NDC’s Deputy Director of Elections and IT would have demanded that the Jean Adukwei Mensa-headed Ghana National Electoral Commission (GNEC) furnish the General Ghanaian Public with a comprehensive record of the officially audited number of both damaged and completely destroyed ballot boxes, as well as the districts and the constituencies, as well as a breakdown of all the regions, together with the number of ballot boxes, respectively, damaged and/or completely destroyed in these regions.
As well, from which of the country’s major political parties the Sammy Gyamfi and the Asiedu-Nketia-recruited thugs and vandals had come from. And if, indeed, as Rashid Tanko Computer so cavalierly and cynically claims, the National Democratic Congress had actually won the 2024 General Election with the kind of comfortable numerical margin that the NDC’s IT maven claims that it had, then why would these “comfortable winners” of a supposedly transparent and procedurally clean and impeccable election resort to the wanton display of violence and mayhem to the horrific extent that even more than two weeks after the Mahama Government had taken over the reins of governance, Kwame Gonja was crisscrossing the length and breadth of the country sternly warning his own criminal party thugs that the open season of wanton “Boot-for-Boot” mayhem that he had personally sicced on his own countrymen and women, by his characteristic use of uncouth and intemperate language was effectively over and done with?
If this is not one surefire way of “Killing” Ghanaian Democracy, what else is it, Tanko Computer? You see, the stark fact of the matter is that the late President Jeremiah “Jerry” John Rawlings-founded institutional and “revolutionary” juggernaut that is the National Democratic Congress has a long history of fomenting violent activities and other acts of extra-judicial mayhem, including the targeted assassination of Superior Court Judges that is absolutely unrivaled by any other political party establishment in postcolonial Ghanaian political history and culture. Now, isn’t this also why terror-mongering leaders of the NDC are so vehemently calling for the re-establishment of Military Tribunals and the operation of the kind of the Death Squads that existed under the Rawlings-led extortionate junta of the erstwhile Provisional National Defense Council (PNDC) and, well before the latter, the Rawlings-led bloody junta of the Armed Forces Revolutionary Council (AFRC)?
Now, other than the scandalous propaganda stunt staged by the media headline-hogging journalists like Manasseh Azure Awuni to further the ethno-tribal interests of the now-President Mahama and the Gonja Micro-Nationalist Mafia-hijacked National Democratic Congress, there is absolutely no forensically credible evidence regarding the fact of any New Patriotic Party-sponsored Fourth-Republican Government having created a terror-charged atmosphere and/or climate of the sort that has become so nauseatingly familiar under National Democratic Congress-sponsored regimes in Ghana’s Fourth Republic.
For example, wasn’t the “Awuni Stunt” that turned out to be a complete cloth of mendacious fabrication readily given away, when the attention-hogging author of a collection of the barely coherent essays that had viciously sought to portray the previous twice, consecutively elected Akufo-Addo Government desperately sought audiences with several key operatives of the latter regime in order to present unsolicited copies of the author’s widely discredited twaddle to the very people whom the Bongo-Frafra native deafeningly and vilely claimed were vampirically demanding to have a vintage taste of his blood like Dracula?
I mean, who, in his presence of mind, or in full control of his sanity, for that matter, would so earnestly and desperately seek unsolicited audience with his sworn would-be assassins? There is absolutely no question in the mind of Yours Truly that the previous twice-elected Akufo-Addo Government of the New Patriotic Party could have done much better than it did, especially in the last couple of years of its second tenure, when the former Agyekum-Kufuor-appointed Attorney-General and Minister of Justice, inching close to 80 years old, well appeared to have precipitously lost quite a remarkable bit of his cranial and cognitive steam or puissance.
Even so, on a fair balance, absolutely in no way, shape or form – in New York City street parlance – could the military fatigues-addicted Gonja Mafia Generalissimo be credibly or creditably compared to His “Lordly” Archbishop of Akyem-Abomosu. Kai, Tofiakwa!!!
By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., PhD
Professor Emeritus, Department of English
SUNY-Nassau Community College
Garden City, New York
E-mail: [email protected]
