I pledge to tell you the stark, naked, steel-hard truth and nothing but the truth, Jomo, but should I lapse into a bit of unconscious lying as I progress with these tales, please cut me some slack, for an irritating blur sometimes falls squarely along the line behind truth and falsehood.
To begin with, Jomo, the whole republic has lined up in one unending file and is trooping into the president’s office at Flagstaff House:
Departing diplomats, to bid the big man farewell, incoming envoys, to pay him diplomatic homage, representatives of striking teachers, to discuss fish and kenkey issues, journalists, to illustrate how Mr. Burke’s so-called first and fourth estates of the almighty realm are not incompatible after all, and trade unionists, for reasons you will presently discern.
Traditional rulers went along too, to remind all and sundry that the old institution of traditional authority is still around and very much as large as life in the scheme of all things current, and to drop subtle hints about wanting to be consulted when it comes to this and that!
Of the lot, it was the visit by energy sector chiefs which had some people anxious: The curious happenings going on in the nation’s political life have saved so many people so much trouble, serving as they have, as sources of welcome distraction for institutions and people who would otherwise have been the critical focus of our attention.
A spate of labour strikes and an epidemic of skullduggery have led to a lull in the emerging power tariffs war between consumers on the one hand and the Volta River Authority and Electricity Company of Ghana on the other but I tell you, Jomo, the respite for the generators and distributors of electricity is only temporary.
Battle field hostilities with resume because the electricity crisis is still raging on with greater debilitating power than the bubonic plague and the VRA and ECG. We have been told normal power supply will resume by the end of April but why should we believe them? They have repeatedly made and reneged on similar promises in the past.
When the energy sector managers went to meet the president, it was apparently to try and help the president make some elementary sense out of the raging power crisis and surprise, surprise, to ask him to make the public pay more for electricity. Those chaps must be joking, Jomo…
The power consuming public is not a colony of inconsiderate users of the utility and I daresay the demand for an increase in tariffs would have made sense to them had it come at a time of fairly satisfactory supply of electricity, don’t you think?
Director of Communications for the Volta River Authority, Mr. Sam Fletcher was grumbling the other day, that for the past decade, Ghanaians have not paid appropriate electricity tariffs and that has led to the poor quality of service by the VRA and ECG.
Nah, nah, nah! Mr. Fletcher must have been misquoted, otherwise what does that mean? What have consumers, many of who actually pay upfront for very poor service, got to do with tariff-fixing and the capacity of the VRA and ECG generate and supply power respectively, we might ask?
According to Mr. Fletcher, the VRA lost one billion Ghana cedis last year as a result of high operational cost resulting from the use of crude oil rather than gas for its production.
If the cost of production rises sharply as a result of an accident involving a gas supply tanker as happened recently, are the owner’s, transporters and corporate buyers of the gas supposed to sort it out with their insurers or pass on the extra cost to their clients, do you know?
As for Flagstaff House, it remains the office of President John Mahama unless the Supreme Court determines otherwise when it finally begins hearing the presidential election dispute on April 16.
The wording of the law sometimes tends to be obscure in meaning and interpretation, so the Supreme Court in Kenya sought and obtained from the petitioners of the disputed March presidential elections, a clear, concise statement of the issues the petitioners wanted the court to base its adjudication of the dispute upon.
In the case of the Kenya dispute, the issues were so clear and straightforward, that Justices Mutunga, Tunoi, Ibrahim, Ojwang, Wanjala, and Njoki spent less than a fortnight in arriving at a verdict.
The first issue the petitioners wanted the Supreme Court to decide on was whether given the evidence made available to the court, the presidential election held on March 4th 2013, had been conducted in a free, fair, transparent and credible manner, whether it had been conducted in compliance with the provisions of Kenya’s Constitution and all relevant provisions of the country’s electoral laws.
The court ruled that the elections had indeed been conducted in compliance with the Constitution and the law.
The second issue was for the court to determine whether given the evidence provided by the petitioners, Uhuru Kenyatta and William Ruto had indeed been validly elected and declared as President-elect and Vice-President elect of the Republic of Kenya respectively, by the Electoral and Boundaries Commissioner. Justice Marungu said it was the decision of the court, that the two respondents had been validly elected.
A third issue was to determine whether the total rejected votes ought to have been included in determining the final tally. The court ruled that the rejected votes ought NOT to have been included in calculating the final tallies in favour of each presidential candidate.
The court said it had no jurisdiction to order a re-computation of the percentages obtained by candidates as sought in the consolidated petition. Finito.
By very sharp contrast, the petitioners and respondents in Ghana’s presidential election dispute literally buried Justice William Atuguba and his panel under an avalanche of secondary petitions, applications, affidavits and motion whose hearings have devoured a lot of time that may have been expended on a timely adjudication of the conflict.
So it came to pass that the Supreme Court in Kenya spent less than a fortnight in hearing and disposing of the dispute while more than three months after the petitioners first filed their petition, the substantive case is yet to be heard.
Now that that the issues on which adjudication of the dispute have been distilled to only two, we hopefully might be getting dispute over with sooner than we expect.
By the way, you may argue that the Supreme Court in Kenya disposed of the case very promptly because the country’s constitution stipulates the adjudication of election disputes by the Supreme Court no later than two weeks after the filing of a petition challenging the results of an election.
You may add that the massacre of thousands in post-election violence in Kenya the last time round, may have disposed the justices of the court to a sense of urgency. You may cap all that with a suggestion that the fast-tracked hearing may have affected the quality of the ruling but hey, the dispute has been resolved and the country has her peace, Anaa?
Article by George Sydney Abugri
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