Lynched army Captain Maxwell Mahama did not want to be a soldier as his ambition was to become a university lecturer, the deceased soldier’s father, Captain Chubby Adam Mahama, has disclosed.

Talking about his late son in an interview, the retired military man said Capt Mahama preferred to go to university, but he advised him to join the army.

“No, he didn’t go to the military because of me… When he got admission to Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST), he preferred the university to the military. He got admitted to the two at the same time and he preferred the university. I asked him why and he said: ‘Daddy, all my friends are going to the university, none of my colleagues is going to the military.

All my colleagues are going to the university together and I will miss their company.’ And I said: ‘If that is the reason, it is not enough. It’s too flimsy, it’s too childish an excuse.

If you go to the military, you come out with a profession and you can still go back and get a degree.’ And that was exactly what he did,” Capt Chubby Mahama told Accra-based Joy FM.

“As soon as he got commissioned, he started a degree programme at the Accra City Campus of the University of Ghana. He got his first degree and quickly proceeded to do his Masters and he got his Masters. So he’d been telling me when he gets to the rank of Major, he would leave the army: ‘I want to establish a business and I also want to proceed in academics to be a lecturer.

I want to be a lecturer. I want to end up in Legon as a lecturer and also help my business so that the business will support me and the lectureship will accomplish my dream of academic work.’

Captain Mahama was lynched on Monday 29 May by a group of irate youth in Denkyira Obuasi who mistook him for an armed robber after a group of people he asked directions from spotted him with a pistol.

His death has received widespread condemnation across the country.