A good friend of mine recently brought my attention to an article written by Dr. Charles Wereko-Brobby, the suspended member of the main opposition New Patriotic Party (NPP) and former CEO of the Volta River Authority (VRA). The article was captioned “Who Is Afraid of Charlotte Osei?” and appeared on the website of Multimedia’s MyJoyOnline.com. The same article also appeared on Ghanaweb.com. What intrigued my dear friend was not the contents of the article itself, but what one rascally Ghanaweb commentator had to say in reference to my name. The article itself had absolutely nothing to do with me, except that the aforesaid commentator was, somehow, convinced that it would do me some good to learn a thing or two about the presumed objectivity of the author.

 

Well, predictably, even as I had promptly told my good friend, I found absolutely no aspect of the aforementioned article that verged on objectivity, for the article merely recalled some tweets that the author claimed to have been intermittently exchanging with Mr. Gabriel Otchere-Darko, the founder and former director of the Accra-based Danquah Institute (DI). But I guess the characteristic highlight of the article was the gratuitous blame that Dr. Wereko-Brobby laid at the feet of some key operatives of the New Patriotic Party, in particular the staunch supporters of Nana Akufo-Addo, the three-time NPP’s Presidential Candidate, of downright hypocrisy vis-à-vis the November 7’s scheduled datefor Election 2016.

 

Dr. Wereko-Brobby’s beef is that the preceding date was consensually agreed upon by IPAC, the working committee of all the legitimately registered political parties in the country, and therefore critics like Mr. Otchere-Darko cannot cavalierly reverse posture by pretending as if the November 7 election date has been unilaterally imposed on the parties by Mrs. Charlotte Kesson-Smith Osei, the chairwoman of the so-called independent Electoral Commission (EC). I have absolutely no qualms with the preceding argument, except to point out the glaring fact that Dr. Wereko-Brobby only used the November 7 date as a proverbial strawman to pooh-pooh his internal political and ideological opponents. And so he conveniently and, perhaps, mischievously failed to deal with the real issue at stake.

 

The real issue at stake here, of course, has to do with the Ramadan-Nimako Supreme Court Decision ordering the EC to promptly expunge the names of all registered voters who registered to vote in the 2012 general election with their National Health Insurance (NHIS) Identity Cards. Dr. Wereko-Brobby, predictably, attempts to disingenuously play the peacock by quizzically claiming that this black-and-white or crystal-clear apex court ruling requires further clarification, obviously because the decision does not favor the side of Vidkun Quisling. Now this is nothing short of the downright farcical, because Justice Jones Dotse, one of the three or four front-bench members of the Supreme Court has publicly and emphatically stated that there is absolutely nothing ambiguous about the fundamental meaning and intent of the Ramadan-Nimako Decision, except in the jaundiced imagination of those mischief-makers pretending that the EC administrators require some remedial tutorials in the English language.

 

Well, I don’t suppose that by his trademark disingenuous insistence on further judicial clarification from the Supreme Court, Dr. Wereko-Brobby is implying that he could understand the Ramadan-Nimako Decision much better if the same were to be translated into the Asante dialect of the Twi/Akan language. Or could I?

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By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.

Garden City, New York

June 9, 2016

E-mail: okoampaahoofe@optimum.net