The People of Ghana elected a new President
The people of Ghana have spoken and they did so emphatically. Indeed any attempt at tampering with the outcome of the recent general election, emphatic as it was, would have resulted in worrying consequences.
The delay in declaring the winner raised the security temperature to a level not too far from boiling point because most people who voted suspected that something was being done to compromise the integrity of the polls.
Many theories have been put out about the deadly electoral manouvres. We are unable to dispute such theories given the body language of certain political players who encouraged their supporters to think that what the pink sheets contained, the basis of the projections of the opposition NPP, were false.
It was irresponsible for Ade Coker, the Greater Accra Regional Chairman of the NDC to pull the wool over the eyes of supporters, most of who lack the sophistication to understand the intricacies of election mathematics, to think that he was right and others were wrong.
The height of the nonsense was the shepherding of the supporters to the residence of the President to congratulate him on a so-called victory.
If that was not a crazy denial, we do not know what else was.
We are constrained to believe that the denial was part of a complex mind game.
Thankfully God intervened and negative efforts to alter the figures failed to fly. We are at our wits end as to why those who planned to plunge this country into an avoidable chaos thought along that tangent.
After choreographing the signing of a peace agreement, it was the belief of many that nobody would encourage their operatives to do anything that would threaten the peace of this country. Unfortunately, we saw the opposite during the dying moments of the elections.
The recent general election has thought us many lessons as a nation and these should be handy in future electoral processes.
The numbers from the general election point at an over-bloated electoral register, a blemish which we must address as a nation.
The controversies which featured in the recent general election should not be witnessed in future polls otherwise we would not have learnt anything.
For those who maintained the position that we have operated an over-bloated voters’ register for a long time they were vindicated by the voter turnout statistics during the polls across the country.
We recall the dust raised by the demand for a new voters’ register. Now there is no doubt that something must be done to address this glaring deficiency.
Let us work towards rig-free elections in the country. Those who have spearheaded the campaign for electoral reforms must not rest on their oars but should, against the backdrop of the realities of the recent polls, come out with appropriate responses to these challenges.
Regarding the voters’ register, the incoming Akufo-Addo government must resuscitate a national identification card programme within one year of the first term of the administration.
After all, this was mentioned during the campaign of the NPP.
Such a national identification when done should form the basis of a new and reliable voters’ register, an important database that would assist in other spheres of national development. It is long overdue but better late than never.