By William
Yaw Owusu
Tuesday,
October 17, 2017
It is turning out that the then ruling National
Democratic Congress (NDC) did not build any official platform to collate
results of the December 2016 general election.
Despite the chants of winning the election ‘one-touch’
by then President John Dramani Mahama, it has turned out that the NDC did not
collate the results but tied its fate to a possible machination of Charlotte
Osei’s Electoral Commission and so when the EC system failed, the NDC was
caught flat-footed.
The party relied on Felix Kwakye Ofosu’s ‘private’ arrangement
to collate the results, which also failed miserably.
Speculations at the time were that the party was in a
secret arrangement with the Electoral Commission to get the results - a move
which was unknown to other political parties.
However, when the commission’s system of
transmission got ‘compromised’ according to EC Chairperson, Charlotte Osei, on
the election night of December 7, 2017, the NDC was found wanting, scurrying
for rescue, which was too late.
According to DAILY GUIDE sources, the NDC
contracted K-NET to build a
digital television platform - DTT - at a whopping cost of over $82 million, but
still the system failed to generate any results.
Panicky
Executives
The panicky NDC leaders then resorted to the Kwakye
Ofosu platform but it was too late for them as the then opposition New
Patriotic Party (NPP), which had a solid platform for the transmission, had
collated results from more than 80%, representing
some 24,000 out of the 29,000 polling stations on election night and had
realized that provisionally, its candidate, Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo, was
defeating incumbent President John Dramani Mahama, who was seeking a second
term in office.
Prof. Kwesi Botchwey’s 13-menmber committee set up
by the NDC to investigate causes of the party’s embarrassing defeat, concluded
on Page 33 of its 65-page Executive Summary that the party’s collation was “a
complete mess.”
Messy
Collation
According to the report - a copy of which is
available to DAILY GUIDE, - Felix Kwakye Ofosu, a former deputy minister of communications,
set up a platform to collate the results of the elections but when the
committee asked him about what transpired, he said it was just a back-up for
the party’s main collation platform.
The report says the party appeared to have relied on
Mr Kwakye Ofosu’s private arrangement when the main collation platform set up
under the supervision of the Election Directorate of the party, headed by Samuel
Ofosu-Ampofo, could have been strengthened to deliver, claiming, “The situation
brought dysfunctionalism in the party to a head.
“There were evidently two systems, one party-based,
and the other, according to Felix Kwakye Ofosu, a private initiative. The Election
Directorate evidently regarded the Kwakye Ofosu initiative as primary whereas
Mr. Kwakye Ofosu and his team regarded it only as backup system.”
The report indicates, “For reasons of its obvious
importance, we treat the subject fully in the main report,” adding, “Our
general finding is that the party’s collation efforts were a complete mess, and
a situation that brought the dysfunctionalism in the party to a head!”
Rigging
System
The suspicion that the NDC put in place a clandestine
plan to rig last year’s polls is not going away any time soon; and the plan
failed because of extra measures put in place by the vigilant NPP.
The Botchwey report has further fueled the suspicion
that the NDC was in bed with the EC to rig the election. But for the alertness
of the NPP, the then ruling NDC would have skewed the more than one million
votes margin that went to Nana Addo to its (NDC’s) advantage.
Comments
made following the release of the report of Prof. Kwesi Botchwey’s committee showed
clearly that the NDC was unprepared as far as the collation of the results were
concerned and were ‘relying’ heavily on the EC’s alleged tacit support to clinch
on to power.
It is turning out that 10 clear
months after such humiliating electoral defeat, the NDC cannot still boast of
its own independent collated results, which took the NPP only six hours to put
together after close of polls.
Comfortable Lead
In the course of the transmission glitch, the NDC
told the entire world that it was in a ‘comfortable lead’ and that its candidate,
Mahama - who later became the first incumbent president to lose an election to
an opposition candidate in the first round - was going to win.
At an Inter-Party Advisory Committee (IPAC) meeting
recently, the EC allegedly admitted that the commission had suffered IT system
crash during the collation of the 2016 results.
Kofi Adams, the NDC National Organizer, who doubled
as Campaign Coordinator for John Mahama, also claimed after the crushing defeat
that the IT system failed the NDC - without providing any explanation, since
the country doesn’t vote electronically
Report
Submission
During the submission of the report, Prof. Botchwey
had recommended among other things, that the party must find ways and means to
“improve the collation of election results.”
In fact, Prof. Botchwey had said that it was time
for the party to find means of collating its own results from polling stations
to the top ‘independently.’
No comments:
Post a Comment