Why do the good people of this country; with all our Peace Council, Men and Women of God and people of substance sit unconcerned while Nigerian-born Charlotte Osei is poking the fire that is already sprouting and would eventually destroy everything the good people of Ghana have done in the past 24 years, to give ourselves a workable system of government?
In a typical Chinua Achebe character, we are behaving “like the man sitting at his door-steps with the house ablaze behind and obstinately arguing against the destructive force of fire.”
If The Chronicle is passionate about Mrs Charlotte Osei and her leadership of the EC, it is because we are totally convinced that she would lead all of us astray.
This woman has never got what it takes to organize credible national elections. And she knows it. Haughty beyond any description, the Chairperson of the Electoral Commission lacks the competence to shoulder the huge responsibility of conducting the highly volatile 2016 elections.
If you talk to senior people Mrs. Osei has ever worked with, the picture that emerges is that of an arrogant woman throwing her lightweight about, without really exhibiting the stuff she is made of; in terms of the end product.
We cannot be sitting pretty when the Electoral Commission she chairs, is behaving like a bull in a China shop.
When an Accra High Court ruled on Friday that Papa Kwesi Nduom, the founder and leader of the Progressive People’s Party ought to be given the chance to correct whatever errors that the compilers of the nomination forms might have made, the conventional wisdom is that the ruling paved the way for many of the 13 disqualified applicants to re-right the wrongs on their forms as well and would be given the chance to contest the polls..
After all, contesting an election does not guarantee automatic success for the contestants. What it does is that it gives the aggrieved person satisfaction that the state has granted his or her wishes and that the message he or she took to the electorate was not strong or convincing enough for the people to buy into it.
What these disqualifications, especially the manner it is being prosecuted by Mrs. Charlotte Osei and the Electoral Commission, in the Dr. Papa Kwesi Nduom affair does, is to gather a ground swell of discontent against the system.
In a circumstance such as this, many of the well-wishers of the disqualified Presidential Candidate(s) could be ready-made materials for rebellion against loyal authority at the slightest case of provocation.
Certainly, this is not the time for the Commission to prove how stubborn it could be by going to the Supreme Court to seek to quash a judgment founded on common sense.
With barely one month to the polls, this is not the time for the Electoral Commission to be litigating.
By this time in 2012, all was set for the polls. Even then, we all saw what came out of the Electoral Petition with former Chairman of the commission, Dr. Kwadwo Afari-Gyan sitting embarrassed in the witness box and reciting twenty-seven zero and several problems with the pink-sheet.
As it is, with 35 days to the actual vote, nothing is certain. We are all in a cycle of uncertainty because the chairperson has not got her pulse on the job.
The Chronicle has always believed that it was wrong to entrust the electoral destiny of this country in the hands of such an untried and untested personality like Charlotte Osei, who appears to have a very weak appreciation of dialogue as a key factor in solving key problems.
The only safe route to the vote is for those directing the show from a distance to appreciate the harm they are doing to this country and relieve her of this burden. She is on a mission to lead Ghana and all its people into temptation.
Source: The Chronicle
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