Ebo Quansah in Accra The heat is now over. After one of the most dramatic events in the political emancipation of this nation, the JM Tuaso has become Mahama Twaso. The transitional team has begun work, and everything being equal, President-elect Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo will formally take over as Head of State of this […]
The post Probe Kofi Adam’s IT failure appeared first on The Chronicle - Ghana News.
Ebo Quansah in Accra
The heat is now over. After one of the most dramatic events in the political emancipation of this nation, the JM Tuaso has become Mahama Twaso. The transitional team has begun work, and everything being equal, President-elect Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo will formally take over as Head of State of this Republic on Saturday, January 7.
What is an equivalent of a political Tsunami has changed the political dynamics of this nation. Victory for Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo was widely anticipated. The margin of victory though, nearly 10 percent of the popular vote more than incumbent John Dramani Mahama, is something that would be the talking point for a long time to come.
If the margin of the Presidential win for the leader of the New Patriotic Party is dramatic, the Parliamentary result is even more exciting for the Elephant Family. With 171 to 104, the NPP is in the comfort zone in the House.
It has been an eventful election. Already two ministers of state have thrown in the towel after losing their parliamentary seats. Mr. Mark Owen Woyongo, one-time Regional Minister for the Upper East, Minister of Defence and Interior, before being redeployed as Minister of State at the Presidency, lost his seat in Parliament to one-time Minister Kofi Adda, and immediately announced his retirement from politics.
It did not take long for another minister to follow suit. Former Minister for Roads and Highways Alhaji Amidu Sulemani, who went into the elections as the Upper West Regional Minister, was soundly beaten in the Sissala West Constituency. Mr. Patrick Al-Hassan Adama polled 13,130 against the former minister’s 9,762 votes.
In a statement that has sour grapes all over it, Alhaji Sulemani said: “I feel proud about my achievements, but it is not for me to rate myself, but the people I represented, who benefitted from the various projects I embarked on.”
The people’s verdict was delivered loud and clear at the various polling stations across Sissala West. The humiliation was apparently too much for the man who believes he has done his utmost best and should have been retained in the House of Parliament.
Mr. Woyongo’s retirement from politics has its genesis in the way and manner he was removed from the Ministry of Defence, and again in Interior. When he lost to Mr. Kofi Adda of the NPP, he felt it was time to bid farewell to politics.
Whether or not he would be tempted back is anybody’s guess. What is important now is how the pockets of violence would subside. I would like to believe President-elect, Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo, a man well-versed in constitutional issues, would call a section of NPP supporters causing mayhem to order.
It makes no sense for people to visit mayhem on their opponents, just because they have either won or lost an election. In this game, losing or winning is not everything. It is the ability to take what is thrown at you on board, and prepare for the next vote that matters.
As a senior citizen of the Ekumfi District and its constituency, I am appalled by the violence that has marred an otherwise momentous occasion. For 24 years, Ekumfi voted for the National Democratic Congress. For all this while, all these parliamentarians have failed to raise any issue about Ekumfi in the august house. In 1992, Mrs. Comfort Owusu represented Ekumfi. A woman of very modest academic achievements, Mrs. Owusu could not articulate any concern of Ekumfi on the floor.
In 2008, Mr. Kutu Blankson, former District Chief Executive for Mfantseman, which included the Ekumfi Constituency at the time, defeated Mrs. Owusu in the NDC primaries, and entered the House. He rose to become Board Chairman of the Ghana Airports Company. But he was not heard much in the House.
When the nation went to the polls in 2012, the clarion call for change in the Ekumfi representation was very loud. Unfortunately, the constituency voted for one of the weakest inks in parliamentary representation in this country. Mr. Abeiku Crentsil did not benefit much from the classroom and was largely deficient in the House.
The choice of Mr. Francis Ato Cudjoe, an alumnus of the University of Ghana with a Master of Business Administration degree, was music in the ears of those seeking a voice for Ekumfi in the house.
Someone said the other day that a little education is a dangerous thing. Unfortunately for the people, and followers of the constituency, two days after conceding defeat and analysing the short-comings of his own political party in the constituency, Mr. Abeiku Crentsil did a Yahaya Jammeh, rejected the declaration, and asked for a recount of the votes, when the results had already been entered the official records, and the electoral officers had left.
Violence erupted when supporters of the NDC, with a cue from their defeated candidate, set on members of the victorious NPP celebrating their win. It is unfortunate, but four people are reported to have been seriously injured from gunshots.
All the injured are supporters of the winning candidate, Ato Cudjoe. A campaign vehicle belonging to the NDC was set ablaze in retaliation, while a hotel built by Mr. Crentsil, after four years of representing Ekumfi in Parliament, was vandalised.
The Ekumfi riots and other pockets of violence throughout the country is not the very best of happenings as we begin the post-mortem on the 2016 Presidential and Parliament elections. Yesterday, Modern Ghana website reported that Mr. Kofi Adams (some say his real name is Adamu), the Campaign Co-Ordinator for the defeated NDC, has accepted blame for the gargantuan defeat of President John Dramani Mahama and his parliamentarians.
The incumbent Head of State polled 44.4 percent of the popular vote against Nana Akufo-Addo’s 53.85 percent. Some analysts believe the outcome of the 2016 elections represents the true voting pattern of Ghanaians, and that previous elections appear to have been padded.
While this assertion is open to analysis, a hint unconsciously dropped by the Campaign Co-Ordinator of the NDC could provide a very interesting clue. While Mr. Kofi Adams said it was appropriate for him to take responsibility for the humiliating defeat as Campaign Co-Ordinator, he indicated that their defeat was due to an IT problem, and that party gurus “have begun investigations to unravel the mystery behind it.”
For me, as a social commentator, the revelation that “their defeat was due to an IT problem,” is pregnant with meaning and ought to be thoroughly investigated.
Mr. Adams is quoted as saying that he was confident the NDC would form the government after the vote in 2020. Whether or not the NDC would return to power in four years time is not my concern at the moment. For me, my interest lies in what would have happened if the Information Technology the NDC had assembled had not failed to function somewhere along the line.
How could an IT failure affect the vote that was duly cast and lead to defeat? There is more to this statement than meets the eye, I would like to submit. I am not a conspiracy theorist, but the behaviour of the NDC and Electoral Commission officials, including President Mahama and his choice as head of the Electoral Commission, Mrs. Charlotte Osei, leading to the official declaration, suggests that there was something Ghanaians did not know, and that is why I am calling on the Bureau of National Investigations, the Criminal Investigations Department of the Ghana Police Service and Military Intelligence to pursue the matter. I am calling for a national probe into the issue.
One would like to believe that when the NDC held two press conferences and claimed that the party was leading, it was a means of assuring their fans to remain calm until the final declaration. Obviously, it was a direct challenge to the claim by the NPP that they had won the polls, at a time Mrs. Charlotte Osei, the E.C. Chair person, was insisting that the commission had not received a single certified result from the 275 constituency coalition centres.
We are told that the New Patriotic Party succeeded in wooing a Ghanaian telecommunications expert from the world famous National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) of the United States to come down and set up an Information Technology system. The system he set up made it possible for the NPP to receive and collate results from all nearly 29,000 polling centres across the country within eight hours after the polls closed.
Mr. Joe Ansah is listed as a Telecommunications Service Manager with NASA, who manages a team of highly competent network of engineers who manage NASA’s Global Mission Telecommunications Wide Area Network (WAN).
His expertise enabled the NPP to own a system that was able to work out the sum of votes coming all over the country. Within eight hours from the close of polls, the party that emerged victorious had computed the results, and knew that their presidential candidate had won with a comfortable majority in Parliament. When the Electoral Commission was not forthcoming with the declaration, and with their supporters sitting on tenterhooks, the temptation was to test the waters, which they did with Campaign Manager Peter Mac Manu addressing a press conference and claiming victory.
When the NDC tried to counter, the demeanour of the main speaker, Mr. Samuel Ofosu-Ampofo, and those who surrounded him in the television cameras, did not appear to portray a group of people who had really won the polls.
Even when President Mahama entered the fray, he did not do so from any convincing stance. For me, Kofi Adams’ declaration that the party’s “defeat was due to an IT problem” throws more light on what might have been going on at the party’s headquarters.
The demeanor of NDC officials on camera told a story of a group of people waiting for some magic that never happened. Could it be that the magic expected was in the form of Information Communications Technology fiddling with and changing the actual number of votes?
I ask this question in view of what E.C. Chairperson Mrs. Charlotte Osei herself said as reason for the delay in declaring the vote. Mrs. Osei told a bewildered nation that the E.C. had been forced to employ the manual collation of votes, because the software they were using had been compromised.
Industry players interpreted her statement to mean that EC’s site for receiving results had been hacked. I am tempted to hold that the failure of the EC’s software to work might have affected the NDC’s Information Technology. And that is where Ghanaians ought to develop interest.
I will like to believe that Mr. Kofi Adams’ declaration that the failure of the party’s IT caused their defeat, feeds into what might have happened at the offices of the Electoral Commission, as well as the NDC head office.
For me, I am under no illusion that both the NDC and the Electoral Commission wanted to try something funny. I have the hunch that the electoral register was deliberately allowed to bloat for such a diabolical exercise. Whatever the apologists of Mrs. Charlotte Osei would want us to believe about her resolve to supervise over a clean poll, I am of the opinion that the Nigerian-born head of Ghana’s Electoral Commission was up to no good.
My reference point is the bloated register, which was allowed to stand all the way to the 2016 vote. This country’s population is just about 26 million. We are told that in the Third World setting, there are more children than adults. Sincerely speaking, therefore, the Ghanaian voters’ register should not contain more than 13 million votes at most. The excess two million was deliberately allowed to stand, in my humble opinion, to be used to manipulate the polls, a point that was not lost on then presidential candidate of the NPP.
Delivering a speech at the Heritage Foundation, a leading Think Tank in Washington DC as Ghanaians prepared for the 2016 elections, Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo said: “No one should take democracy for granted. Democracy must be protected at all times. Right now, it is under threat in Ghana.”
Read the lips of the leader of the opposition at the time: “The biggest threat facing Ghana’s democracy is our fraudulent voter register. It contains millions of extra names. The register is bloated. It is estimated that upwards of 2 million of the registered voters are bogus. It is packed with ineligible under-aged voters and foreign and fake identities. If we’re calling ourselves a democracy, this is unacceptable. This is a real problem, the kind that cannot be brushed aside under the carpet, as it provides the vehicle for manipulation and fraud.”
In my humble opinion, the failure of the Information Technology at the NDC head office could be linked to the failure of the system to manipulate the figures, using the extra two million ghost or ineligible voter’s names on it.
Ghanaians must be grateful to the unseen hand that touched the EC’s software and rendered it useless on the day of the vote. Remember the fight the Electoral Commission put up to retain these names when it was easier to compile a new voters’ register. On the day Mrs. Osei declared Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo winner of the presidential vote, many Ghanaians were grateful to her leadership of the commission. Many sang in her praises.
For me, Mrs. Charlotte Osei is still the wrong choice. She was smuggled in to do the dirty job of her appointees, I dare state. I shall continue to be at her heels until the authorities do the right thing. The Chair of the Electoral Commission ended her declaration of the vote on Friday night by quoting the Ghana National Anthem, “God Bless Our Homeland Ghana.” It is my prayer that in blessing our homeland, the hand of the Almighty would lead this country into unraveling the mystery of what happened behind the scenes, when the good people of this country went to the polls.
I shall return!
The post Probe Kofi Adam’s IT failure appeared first on The Chronicle - Ghana News.
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