As I sat listening to Charlotte Osei

I have trained myself not to believe the worst about people. All my life, at least, since 1979, I look out for the best in my fellow humans. 

So I do not know why I nearly fell off my seat on learning that the chairperson of the Electoral Commission, Mrs Charlotte Osei, was a Christian, a regular and punctual face at the Christian Action Faith Ministry (Duncan Williams’ church).

Well, I haven’t said here, and will never say anywhere, that everybody who goes to church has a true heart or is a Christian in the sense that Jesus meant when He spoke with Nicodemus that night.  I also know that even for the so-termed born-again believers, it is not all of them whose life is an advertisement of the faith they professes. So I am not, in this piece, saying that Charlotte Osei is necessarily a saint or that she does not sin and will never, one day, sin. 

As I sat listening to her keynote address at the 21st GJA Awards, however, I kept asking myself: if there is nothing to prove that this lady is an angel, what evidence do I have to prove that she is a demon? What is there about her that makes her look like she’s guilty as charged? Is it because of her good looks (at least, Kweku Baako openly confessed on Kwame Sefa Kayi’s Peace FM morning show, that she was pretty). Is it her cocksureness, her self-confidence?

Back to Banquet Hall. Her address was making sense. She was saying the right things, pleading with the media lest we allow a total bigot or a mercenary with a selfish agenda to get away with murder (crucifying totally innocent personalities) or cause fear and panic. I winced, suddenly remembering that ours is the society where people get lynched because a certain man shouted that his genitals vanished after making contact with them. 

That woke me up. How come, I asked myself, that for 20 years, Afari-Gyan remained a demon in the eyes of Ghanaians; that though all of us at one point or the other, railed accusations against the man, no-one, till this day, has evidence of wrongdoing against him. 

Of course, I have, on this page of the Daily Graphic, questioned decisions of the EC, headed by  Mrs Charlotte Osei, but my disagreement with her gives me no right to impugn her morality.

Then I thought of Ace Anan Ankomah’s Facebook post in reaction to what Kennedy Agyepong said about the EC boss at the NPP rally at Asokwa recently. Ace did not say Charlotte Osei has never sinned or will never sin, but he stated his case in defence of a lady he had known in person, as a fellow student at Legon and at Queen’s University in Canada and “as an Associate in my firm”. On the basis of what he knew about her over this long period of time, Ace found the personal attacks on her unjustifiable.

Now let’s listen to Ace (the statement he wrote that shook something in me and formed the basis of the decision to write this piece): “I have two daughters, and I hope that they will pursue education, at least, up to the level that Charlotte achieved... I would go ballistic if anyone suggests, in the future, that they are only who or what they are and will become, for any reason other than personal attainment and achievement. And I will shoot anyone who says that that other reason is sex”.

When someone accuses a man or a woman in whom you have faith, the first instinct is to reject it. But, it is a habit of the human mind that the allegation has a way of coming back to play tricks with the imagination, until the more you think of it; it begins to take on a semblance of possibility. You still trust this friend or cousin or sibling or parent but a certain seed has been sown in your mind that disturbs the mental pictures you have of him or her. It’s human. 

Have we ever paused to imagine the harrowing mental torture Charlotte Osei’s husband could be going through, if he is not strong? Without intending to question her integrity, it is possible for a question or two to cross his mind: “Eissh! Is it possible Kennedy Agyepong knows something nobody is telling me?” It is human to be thus mentally agitated. It is human for our faith to be pierced. But I daresay it should not be pierced by the arrows or sword of recklessness in the hands of people who do not have the faintest iota or evidence. 

So as I sat listening to Charlotte Osei, I asked myself: Why is she suffering such indignities? The answer was simple. Because she happens to be the EC Boss and she is a woman. 

Why am I writing this for Charlotte Osei? The answer is in the famous quote of James Baldwin’s Open Letter to the lady he describes simply as ‘Sister Angela Davis’: “If they came for your brother in the morning, they will come for you in the night”. 

Dear reader, have you taken note of the rod with which Takyi is being thrashed? Mark it, it will be used against you one day. That is why I write for Charlotte Osei.