Many thumbs will be deprived of action on Election Day, December 7. My own pretty thumb is on the line too. For decades, I’ve kept her on high heat to vote but now her chances at participating in this very important civic duty have been dimmed by the misbehaviour of the Electoral Commission.
How? Recently, a strange thing happened on our shores for nine days that left me baffled, leaving me to believe that if God should ever grant the EC the task to register people for heaven, many will be left to toast and roast in super-heated hell. During the toasting and roasting, some will manage to sneak through to land in God’s cushy bosom. However, others, including me, will be left behind to roast into eternity and beyond.
The EC will ensure that there will be maximum gnashing of teeth till all teeth are chewed and mouth emptied. Throat-choking thirst will be the lot of prospective registrants. The devil will stop by to drop bitter poisonous fruit juices to quench thirst. But no amount of groaning and wailing will help. For the EC, hell is not just a welcoming place but the only way to get a ticket to vote.
There is a fascinating funeral practice in which the funeral ads state, “No wake-Keeping.” Don’t be fooled! If you are close to the bereaved, you better make your way to the funeral grounds between 10 pm and midnight, clothed in the right mourning colours, to lavish heartfelt condolences. While doing that, you are also expected to stare at the decomposing corpse. Fact is, “No Wake-Keeping” is only a decorative way of saying, “Let’s see how much you love the bereaved!”
So it is with the EC. To register to vote, you must first suffer because there is wake-keeping at the funeral. The EC announced that the exercise was to begin at 7 am. That was meant to test eligible voters to measure how much we love Ghana and the extent of our determination and desperation to vote. We were actually expected to show up for wake-keeping, and to have oil in our lamps, ready to receive Doctor EC at ungodly times with or without registration forms or Polaroid cameras, or else…. Some of us aging fragile first-time voters could not stay up; neither did we have adequate oil in our lamps. So, the registration exercise came and went, leaving us fish-eyed and disenfranchised.
The just-ended voter registration exercise was an endurance test of ones ability to suffer indignity in ‘logo-logi’ queues, and of high tolerance of the senseless spectacular drama while surviving heat exhaustion standing at one spot for endless hours in the harsh tropical sun. It was also meant to test ones willingness to risk dear life and sanity to arrive at registration centres at dawn. If you failed the endurance tests, your solemn constitutional right to vote was snatched from you; no questions asked. Unfortunately, the EC neglected to announce these basic qualifications.
Undoubtedly, the registration exercise was set up for the young and strong and idle. Ordinary-citizen Dr Afari-Gyan could not have withstood the torturous, heartless and vulgar endurance tests prevalent in parts of the country to have successfully registered as a voter because let’s face it, he is no chicken either! He would have ruptured!
He apologised afterwards. He spoke to us sorrowful disenfranchised from the bushes of Dodowa on August 13. I heard him from the back of the maddening crowd saying, “I’m sorry for degrading you, for the hot sunshine you had to endure, for your thirst, hunger and sleeplessness; for your stinky armpits and your smelly mouths; for the red dust high up your dark gaping nostrils, your uncombed hair and filthy look, worn out chale wote ……”
Some of us fragile people who couldn’t survive the sunshine and therefore could not be registered began to scream, lost in the crowd:
“Doctor, we couldn’t all register. What should we do?”
“Sir, what exactly are you apologizing for?”
“Papa, how soon can we register to vote?”
To these questions, Doctor EC yelled back at us:
“Suck it up! I gave you one full week plus two days! You couldn’t register? Deal with it! No vote for you!”
Akwasi Opia, an outspoken middle-aged disenfranchised ‘returnee’ babbled on with a quavering voice, “Doctor, this is not 1984. We no go sit down make you disenfranchise us today. Issue us all disenfranchised with Apology Certificates (AP) with which to vote.”
But before Opia’s frail voice faded away, Doctor EC walked away murmuring: “There are too many Ghanaians. The voters’ register is now full, bursting at the seams.”
So, the voter registration exercise is over. Really? Damn! Spit out the thought.
December 7 will therefore meet disenfranchised Ghanaians with idle thumbs, inkless thumbs, sorrowful thumbs, restless thumbs, useless thumbs, ink-starved thumbs …. The EC has no mercy for the many tired (like me) who had sharpened our thumbs for years, waiting for this unique opportunity to exercise our votes, probably a once-in-a-life-time event. So I’m changing directions, looking for a dark ink-stained bandage. If thanks to the EC, my pretty thumb will not be functional on December 7, it must at least be protected from ‘haters’ like Frank Ocran who might ridicule it.
If the present status quo does not change, my thumb might be unable to vote for either “The Best Man for Ghana” or “The Better Man for Ghana.” Hey, the December 7 election is about manhood. You didn’t know that? My parliamentary candidates should forget it too; the EC has stolen my vote in early August, long before December 7!
Goat thieves are horrible people. You rear your goats, dig through people’s rubbish to locate tired cassava peals to feed them. At times you intentionally let them loose to break into people’s yards to mess around, for fun. Then as you watch them fatten up, salivating for the night before Christmas when you plan to tie one of them to the stakes and convert it into a good meal, someone sneaks in to steal your most well-fed goat! Ouch! That hurts. That is the kind of pain you feel when unsuspectingly, a vote thief sneaks in to steal a vote you have nurtured for years.
While I wait, hoping that the EC may see the light and enfranchise me and many others, I go down on my wobbly knees to cry to heaven, “Dear God, your good book says that your son will return to take us good people to heaven to rest in your bosom. Father, you know that I have been very good, to the best of my ability, with the exception of the twelve or nineteen things I confessed to you recently. God, my current fears are centred on the Electoral Commission. Please God, if you desperately need an organization to assist you with the simple exercise of compiling names to enable you separate the wheat from the chaff for selection for heaven and hell, please look elsewhere. If you make the mistake of assigning this simple task to the EC, all my efforts at being good will be brought to naught and I might end up in the unquenchable fire of hell, forever! Amen!”
+233208286817; dorisdartey@yahoo.com
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