After almost a month after the ruling of the election petition allowing ourselves to bask in the praise of how well we kept together as a country, it’s just appropriate that we remind ourselves of the other side of the story that we might have forgotten.

It’s understandable that we let the positives remain with us but posterity will also not forgive us if we don’t recount the negatives and learn from them. While we stand proud for going through this peacefully did we as a country have to experience such tensions almost like a ghost nation because a verdict on an election petition was going to be delivered? Shouldn’t it have been a normal occurrence that no matter how unique this case is, it’s still a court case and 29th August should have been like any other day?

Well maybe comparing to African standards we should pad ourselves on the back, but I hope we reach will reach a stage where such democratic agitations will be as normal as in other jurisdictions.

I was one of the fiercest critics of the NPP Minority in Parliament when they decided to boycott anything that has to do with the President in Parliament. I opposed it because as a party, NPP has taken a stand to follow due process and seek redress in the highest court of the land. Taking an issue to court will result in either proving you are right or wrong. And until that was done the allegations and suspicion remain as the name suggest.

It was therefore strange that knowing the biggest opposition party in Parliament will boycott what they are paid to do. The obvious question in those times was, if you boycott and you are proven wrong as it was shown in the verdict then how do you rectify such dereliction of duty the country has imposed on you and for which the tax payers money is used to pay you?

For  some of us what would have been the best thing to do was to let the lawyers fight the case at the law courts and the legislature do their work. For some reason the NPP did not see this as the best way and had to rip the nation off with partial parliamentary duties. And even though they did partial parliamentary duties we paid them in full and they were even crying for more as parliamentarians.

Nobody should take the work of the minority in parliament lightly especially with duties like vetting and scrutinising government work. Vetting for example brings out a lot of ‘hidden’ things with the minority leading such exposures. Even if at the end the majority uses their numbers to bully their way through to get their appointees confirmed, Ghanaians are exposed to the nature of the appointees and some revelations about them.

In some instances some truths are forced out of them which hitherto had been twisted. An example that comes to mind is when Fifi Kwetey, a deputy finance minister admitted that the allegations made concerning President Kuffour’s administration diverting some shipment of national wealth for personal and party gain was just propaganda.

 Ama Beyiwa Doe’s confessions can also not be forgotten. I can bet that if these admissions have not been forced out people will still have believed there are some truths in them. Again in the era of gargantuan judgement debt payments with the supreme court saying some of the payments are as a result of bad work by officials and lack of scrutiny by parliament, these are the times we need the Minority the most - to subject anything coming from the Presidency to serious scrutiny. Unfortunately that is the time they decided to abandon their Constitutional duty.

I was in the UK when this court case started. A Tanzanian friend of mine just walked to me and said, I hear your President rigged the elections and is labelled a thief. That he was so disappointed in Ghana after all we have achieved in our democratic journey. And that was the general feeling among some of my foreign friends who followed politics in Africa.

No matter how much I tried to explain the issues to him, he was convinced the elections were rigged and that the Ghanaian President was a thief. But can you blame him? When the whole Minority leader with his entourage carried placards with inscriptions as ‘stealers’ directed at the President and his party?The irony of it was that the case the NPP itself sent to court never accused the President of any stealing.

In fact the NPP said throughout the case that they don’t have any issues with the President and his party. And when even their star witness in the person of Dr. Bawumia was confronted with anything like that he denied it in open court in the glare view of all Ghanaians.

For them the problem has always been with the EC and if it was not because it was President Mahama who won the elections or as they put it benefitted from the alleged malpractices he would not have been joined in the case. The NPP branch in the UK also took inspiration from parliament and called the President a thief during a visit to the UK

As I stated its good we all pat ourselves on the back for maintaining the peace during those 8 tension-packed months. But we wouldn’t have learnt much if we don’t look back and tell ourselves that never are we going to paint ourselves black and show it to the outside world especially concerning and President and most especially when we don’t have any basis