Even in the most sophisticated societies, sophisticated measuring tools are unable to tell causes of unexpected election outcomes. Such results would have been unexpected because predictors were unable to read what exactly were in the heads of voters. My mum of blessed memory would always say the head has no key to open to see what’s exactly within. So fear the one casting the ballot, someone would say.
But of course, there is something also called stealing an election outcome. In 2008, congress cheated by over voting (when total number of ballot papers in a box exceed the total number of voters who actually cast a ballot) which they chose to call ballot stuffing. They prayed for, and probably got over registration with ghost names to enable that practice of over voting.
Where there is genuinely no vote cheating, results would be such that people, even experts, would be asking whether voters were not discerning, irrational, flimsy thinking, or were just cutting the nose to spite the face. Often, when results create that picture, some would say people were voting a government out and not government in. In other words, the incoming would have benefitted from the wrath being wreaked on the outgone.
Such an argument would not apply to what happened in 2008. The Kufuor government, over eight short years and by the longest of shots, had outperformed its predecessor Rawlings one, which had enjoyed unchallenged power for a period spanning close to three times what Kufuor had. It would, thus, make no sense, for that government to have been voted out. It shatters any myth of discerning voters. Neither would it be helpful to any logical analysis that a government was voted in, leaving the sensible: a stolen election.
It is presumed the election result is a social contract between the one seeking office and the one who votes and thereby consents to the office seeker being installed into office in expectation of the voter’s predetermined deliverables. The contract requires that the office holder provides the voter with improved living conditions among which would be what the voter defines. These days, expected deliverables include petrol price, roads, education funding, and the rate at which the cedi depreciates when exchanged for other currencies.
But even before that, where the previous administration has been accused of creating, sharing and looting, either through judgment debts, among which would be woyomising, or by bus branding, the electorate expect the monies to be retrieved quickly. They want to see action in the courts or wherever or in whatever form of stolen money retrieval.
When someone says a garrulous ‘amp?br?’ baby with sharp teeth has managed, against all the cry over undelivered deliverables, to find hard US three million dollars cash to pay for two plush houses, the voter, as part of their contract with whoever is responsible, expect prompt action to retrieve the cash. In the voter’s mind, the retrieval should be easier when someone has pointed out the source of that cash as election bribing.
Deliverables are so often contradictory. People expect services without paying the charges with which those services would be procured. The voter wants free education, allowances for student teachers and nurses. However, they simultaneously expect cheaper fuel prices and lowered import duties, sources that should finance the free and free. Simultaneously, they want to forget the long term goal of jobs for the many who will be produced with the free, free.
They may argue reasonably, that education must come before jobs and that everyone has to be educated whether there will be jobs or not. As a result, their immediate expected deliverable is education for all. They may even add that if you educate well, the educated will be able to find their own jobs. There you are then; you who are supposed to deliver the deliverables, confronted with that incompatible situation of no surplus after free delivery to create the jobs.
An approach to showing the electorate that deliverables are being delivered is to ensure that while the free is pursued relentlessly because it is right, to provide that right, the people see some jobs also being created at the same time. Frankly, it is not because there is too little to provide free and jobs at the same time. The difficulty with delivering the deliverable, when they seem to be opposed to each other when they really are not, is because of chop, chop.
The amp?br? squad is very much aware of that and they would do everything to twist the minds of the electorate that fuel price has unforgivably gone up and that there are no jobs. They suspect, or possibly know that some chop, chop is occurring somewhere. You contain them by making them answer to their thievery while staying away from thieving.
By Kwasi Ansu-Kyeremeh