Anti-gay bill: NPP can’t ‘break the 8’ if Akufo-Addo signs bill – Martin Amidu

Lawyer and former Special Prosecutor, Martin Amidu has argued that President Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo’s aim of winning a third consecutive four-year presidential term for the New Patriotic Party(NPP) will not materialise if he signs the anti-LGBTQI act into law.

In an article asserting that it will amount to political suicide if President Akufo-Addo signs the anti-LGBTQI act into law, Mr Amidu explained that the President has over the years built a relationship with the geopolitical West and since signing the act into law will offend them and compromise his ability to win the upcoming General Elections for the NPP, he will not sign it.

“As I told my interlocutors then, “self-preservation is the first law of nature” and Nana Akufo-Addo will be committing suicide to assent the LGBTQ+ Bill passed by Parliament into law. Nana Akufo-Addo’s long game, the aura he has built around himself as a democrat in the Western tradition, and all the ingratiation efforts he has invested in, will come to nought should he assent to the Bill upon passage. The fact that other citizens closely watching the Ghanaian political scene knew the difficulty the Bill was going to face when it got to the desk of the President was articulated by no less a person than Minority Leader Ato Forson…,” he argued.

He then went on to explain further:

“Nana Akufo-Addo will not commit suicide in the few months remaining for his Presidency to end and his hope of handing over to his chosen surrogate. Nana Akufo-Addo has come a long way since the bad press attributed to the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and the West Africa Commission on Drugs (WACD) of allegations against him for taking donation from a drug dealer brother-in-law whose seized assets he allegedly returned as the Attorney-General for his political survival. Nana Akufo-Addo reinvented himself. Attempts to use these allegations by his political opponents in the 2016 presidential election failed, and he became President of Ghana. He has since rehabilitated himself, placed his administration within the obit of the geopolitical West and has curried favours with them.

The problem with the endemically partisan and divided parasitic political elite and middle-class Ghanaian upon whom the sustenance of constitutionalism, democracy and the rule of law depends is its incremental development of emotional and ideological attachment to secular, religious and cultural ideologies which affects their bank of knowledge when assessing objective reality and phenomenon. The self-interest of the parasitic political elite, and the middle class has come to triumph over community, societal and national interest.

Otherwise, the fact that Nana Akufo-Addo will not assent to any bill that offends the sensibilities of the friends he has cultivated in the geopolitical West has been lying in plain view since 7 January 2017.”

The Parliament of Ghana recently passed the anti-LGBTQI bill. The bill imposes custodial sentences for persons who engage in or promote or support LGBTQI+.

President Akufo-Addo, in reaction, noted that he would withhold assenting to the bill until a Supreme Court determines the constitutionality or otherwise of the bill.