|
Playing leap-frog with the
unicorn, after the Supreme Court’s verdict
E. Ablorh-Odjidja
August 31, 2013
We have bought peace for now with
the Supreme Court verdict on the Petition challenge that just
ended. Some within a political class will hail the verdict as a
Solomon-like judgment.
President John Mahama has won the
verdict. And sectors
from our society, associations, and businesses, are rushing to
congratulate him.
However, Mr. Kofi Annan, the
former Secretary-General of the UN has offered his
congratulation with a note of caution.
He has asked, “for reforms in
Ghana's electoral system to address the flaws that were
identified during the hearing of the election petition
challenging John Mahama's presidency.”
Mr. Annan has warned that the
successful conclusion of the court case “must not blind us to
the flaws in our electoral " system.
Many flaws were made obvious
during the trial. These
flaws pose danger to future elections.
The next election is slated for 2016, only three years
away. Should we risk the same flaws of 2012 for that election
too?
Leave the election flaws in place
and we will be executing the game of leapfrog with the Unicorn.
Sooner or later there will be a miss and we will be
gored.
There is no need to pretend that
the 2012 election wasn’t messy. The huge discrepancies between
the number of biometric registered voters and the actual vote
count pointed to a troubled system.
We invested millions of cedis in
a biometric registration system, a truth barometer, only to have
its veracity immediately compromised by the very process it was
commissioned to police.
The court has dismissed the
charges brought against the winner and respondents.
And the Petitioners have already conceded.
But this case will
continue to represent dodgy legal precedence and, therefore,
will have an impact on many electoral cases to come.
The verdict is no news for
celebration. The only consolation is that the decision was not
unanimous.
“Apart from the duplicate serial
numbers and voting without biometric verification, all of which
the judges were unanimous in dismissing, the case of over-voting
and the absence of signatures by the presiding officers had the
judges splitting hairs,” said a Joy News report.
And that four of the nine judges
upheld the “over-voting and the absence of signatures by the
presiding officers” part of the Petition as valid grievances.
The four judges’ dissent is
enough reason to ask for an overhaul of our electoral system and
its rules.
But if the past is the prelude,
we must expect the lessons of dissent from the judges to be soon
forgotten and the political turbulences to continue.
The above observation is true
when we consider the response to the verdict giving by the
winning side.
As expressed by Vice President
Amissah-Arthur and reported by Joy news immediately after the
verdict, the winning side’s view was that “all the allegations ought
to have been dismissed emphatically with a 9-0 verdict”.
He has no misgivings but was then quick to jump
into the politics of the trial.
His government that has already been hurt by scandals
before the trial, is not to be blamed for the unrest in the
country. And he was quick to shift the blame to
distractions purportedly caused by the Petition trial.
Government business and the
economy, he said, were affected “in no small way” by the
unnecessary Petition case.
The "unwarranted Petition case"
will become the sound bite for the political battles ahead.
Lessons from the trial have already been drowned.
And thus will begin the leapfrog
game with the unicorn.
But let’s visit the problem
again. If four out of nine judges could consider the
“over-voting and the absence of signatures by presiding
officers” in the 2012 presidential election as infractions why
should the Petitioners not have had doubts about the result from
the same?
That a primary document that was
supposed to pull together critical election data ended up so
heavily flawed should be a legitimate cause for concern about
the process.
Yet the Electoral Commission,
presented with the evidence, did not bother to give it a second
look!
The numbers on those famed Pink
Sheets were so confusing that the EC was forced to claim them in
court as clerical and administrative errors.
However, the size of the infractions alone should have
suggested willful human agency.
The errors were crucial elements
in the trial but were not satisfactorily explained away, as
evidenced by the dissent votes of the four judges.
Even with the Supreme Court
verdict in place, it is still hard to understand the Electoral
Commissioner’s behavior, as he hurriedly pronounced the winner.
He had a motive.
And we got to this point of a “Petition Trial Case”
because of what the EC did.
He has appeared like a partisan
in his hurry to establish the result as fact, never mind how
flawed.
For the good of the country, we
must accept the view expressed by Secretary-General Annan and
reject that of VP Amissah.
A truth commission must be tasked
to target the EC for faulty administration of the 2012 election.
It must also go after the
affected presiding officials for allowing the absence of their
signatures on the ballot authenticating Pink Sheets.
Was the omission of signatures on
the Pink Sheets honest neglect or a forced commission brought on
by an influential entity?
The Supreme Justices may have
reached their verdict because of concern for peace and
stability. But that
decision must not end here.
It should have asked for a revision of the electoral
system, starting with the staffing at the Electoral Commission.
For now, congratulations to our
country for having managed to escape a nasty political upheaval
as a consequence of a flawed election.
What to do next is to allow Secretary-General Kofi
Annan’s suggestion for reform to happen.
But just in case you think reform
is not needed, be reminded of the horn of the Unicorn; it is not
wise to play leapfrog with a known hazard.
E. Ablorh-Odjidja, publisher,
www.ghanadot.com, Washington, DC, August 31, 2013
Permission to publish: Please
feel free to publish or reproduce, with credits, unedited. If
posted at a website, email a copy of the web page to
publisher@ghanadot.com. Or don't publish at all.
|
