By William
Yaw Owusu
Tuesday
September 18, 2018
The abysmal performance of the opposition National
Democratic Congress (NDC) in the December 7, 2016 general elections is coming
back to haunt Samuel Ofosu-Ampofo, who is the party’s Director of Elections.
Mr. Ofosu Ampofo, who as doubles as Vice Chairman of
NDC, is seeking to replace Kofi Portuphy, the National Chairman of the party.
But some NDC elements are using his ‘role’ as Director
of Elections in the 2016 elections, particularly the collation of the presidential
election result, against him.
Massive
Campaign
His critics say he failed to supervise the collation
of the results in the 2016 general elections which got the NDC ‘stranded’ on
December 7 and 8, 2016 and cannot be trusted as the party’s leader.
Interestingly, by 11 pm on December 7, 2016, then
opposition New Patriotic Party (NPP) had received about 80% of all the pink
sheet results in the country and had made the calculations to know that their
candidate Nana Akufo-Addo was winning the presidential election one-touch.
Botchwey’s
Report
The Prof. Kwesi Botchwey-led committee that
investigated why the NDC lost massively later established that the party did
not build any official platform to collate results of the 2016 general elections.
However, Mr. Ofosu-Ampofo claimed recently that the
party had the results and were only waiting for the Electoral Commission to ‘gazette’
the official results so that they could authenticate what the NDC had collated.
“When you go to the EC’s website the presidential
result from polling station to polling station has not been gazetted and as a
political party we are worried. We are holding our results and they (Electoral
Commission) are also holding their results even though we both went into the
room.”
“If you want to do proper analysis of the outcome of
the elections you need to get a gazzetted presidential result to check it
against what we (NDC) also had on the field. As we speak now the Electoral
Commission is yet to gazette the presidential results almost 18 to 19 months after
the elections,” he said.
Damning
Findings
Strangely, Mr. Ofosu Ampofo appeared before the 13
member Botchwey Committee to explain issues to them but the committee, in its
report, made damning findings against the performance of the NDC Election
Committee, headed by Mr. Ofosu Ampofo.
Despite the chants of ‘we are winning the election one-touch’
by then incumbent President John Mahama and later ‘we are in a comfortable
lead’ mantra, it turned out the NDC did not collate the results but rather tied
the party’s ‘destiny’ to that of Charlotte Osei’s Electoral Commission by
relying on the EC’s IT system so when the EC’s system failed, the NDC was
caught flat-footed, gasping for breath.
Private
Arrangement
The NDC members rather relied on Felix Kwakye
Ofosu’s ‘private’ arrangement to collate the result which also failed them
miserably, according to the report.
Reports at the time said that the party was in
secret talks with the Electoral Commission to get the results, a move which was
unknown to the other political parties.
However, when the commission’s system of
transmission was ‘compromised,’ according to the sacked EC Chairperson, Charlotte
Osei on the election night on December 7, 2017, the NDC was found wanting,
scurrying for salvation which was too late.
According to DAILY GUIDE’s sources, the NDC
contracted K-NET, the company building digital television platform, DTT at the
whopping cost of over $82million, but the system failed to generate any
results.
Panicky
Executives
The panicky NDC leaders then resorted to Kwakye
Ofosu’s platform but it was too late for them, as then opposition New Patriotic
Party (NPP), which had a solid platform for the transmission, had collated
results from more than 80% of the pink sheets, representing some 24,000 out of
the 29,000 polling stations on election night.
It quickly realized that provisionally their
candidate Nana Akufo-Addo, now President of Ghana, was leading incumbent
President John Dramani Mahama (NDC), who was seeking re-election.
The Botchwey committee said on Page 33 of the
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 results of the election but when
the committee posed questions to him, he said it was just a ‘back-up’ for the
party’s main collation platform.
The report said the party appeared to have relied on
Kwakye Ofosu’s private arrangement when the main collation platform set up
under the supervision of the Election Directorate, headed by Samuel
Ofosu-Ampofo, could have been strengthened to deliver, saying “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’s initiative as
primary whereas Mr. Kwakye Ofosu and his team regarded it only as backup
system,” the report said.
The report said that “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!”
Mr. Ofosu Ampofo is slugging it out with four others-
Betty Mould Iddrisu, former Attorney General, Alhaji Hudu Yahaya, former
General Secretary, Dan Abodakpi, former Trade and Industry Minister and former
NDC MP for Keta, as well as Danny Annang, former member of the Council of State,
for the chairmanship position.
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