It is rather outrageous for anybody to believe that Nana Akufo-Addo would plant a story about himself being terminally afflicted with cancer, when his man rivals and political opponents have strategically made a nauseating issue out of his age, and the implications of the latter factor on his ability to effectively perform as President of Ghana, should luck kiss the three-time Presidential Candidate of the main opposition New Patriotic Party (NPP) come December 7 (See “Ade Coker Blasts Freddy Blay Over Nana Addo’s Cancer Story” Peacefmonline.com / Ghanaweb.com 8/31/16).

But it is quite understandable that a merciless political hawk like Mr. Joseph Ade Coker, the Greater-Accra Regional Chairman of the ruling National Democratic Congress (NDC), would impute such dastardly motive to the leaders of the NPP, because the NDC operatives used the death of President John Evans Atta-Mills, their party’s leader, to cynically garner voter sympathy in the lead-up to the 2012 general election.

I have not come across the version of the cancer story which Mr. Coker claims to have been published by the Freddie Blay-owned Daily Guide newspaper, but it is quite likely that such publication was aimed at exposing the seamy political underbelly of the NDC operatives’ perennial attempt to scandalize Nana Akufo-Addo with various forms of irresponsible and reprehensible conduct unbecoming of a would-be President of Ghana.

But that the Akufo-Addo cancer story originated from the Steve Mallory-owned and New York-based Africawatch magazine, makes the collusive complicity of the key operatives of the National Democratic Congress all too obvious, if also because the editor-publisher of Africawatch makes absolutely no journalistically balanced attempt to equally publish any medical report on the state of health of 58-year-old President John Dramani Mahama.

Going by the officially established fact of the life-expectancy of Ghanaians being approximately 60 years, there can be no gainsaying that the chances of either Nana Akufo-Addo or Mr. Mahama expiring any moment from now are statistically insignificant.

It is also widely known that Mr. Mallory is a wounded man on the lookout for vendetta; and also the fact that this self-proclaimed Akufo-Addo nemesis is heavily backed financially by key operatives of the National Democratic Congress.

They may quibble over the amount of financial “investment” – to speak euphemistically about the NDC word for “payola” – pumped into the Mallory Vendetta Project, but there is glaring evidence of devilish NDC hands in the details of the Akufo-Addo cancer story.

NDC operatives like Mr. Ade Coker have been vehemently denying any involvement in this malice-laced hatchet job because these jaded and decidedly bankrupt faux-revolutionaries are fast becoming aware of the fact that the Ghanaian electorate is increasingly becoming sophisticated enough to differentiate between political propaganda and the concrete and substantive policy agenda presented by the leaders of the New Patriotic Party.

The Mahama Posse has yet to present Ghanaians with any visionary development agenda. For the nearly 8 years that the Mills Mahama regime, and presently the Mahama/Amissah-Arthur regime, have ruled the roost, the NDC agenda has largely been composed of rag-tag ad-hoc measures of the sort widely known to be peculiar to political opportunists. Which is why they would so scandalously resort to the lurid and long-discredited politics of character assassination.
On the question of whether President Mahama legally or constitutionally applied his prerogative of pardon vis-à-vis the release of the Montie Three pro-NDC propagandists, Mr. Coker would do well to save himself from unwanted embarrassment by allowing expert lawyers like Mr. Alfred Tuah-Yeboah to do what they have been specially trained to do. In other words, it does not serve the NDC apparatchiks any good by pretending that serious legal lights like Attorney Tuah-Yeboah are more concerned with cheap publicity and the profit-and-loss margin, when there is glaring evidence that President Mahama overstepped the bounds of his executive authority.

If the 1992 Constitution allows presidential pardons primarily in criminal cases prosecuted by the Office of the Attorney-General, then it is as simple as that. Which is to say that the presidential pardon granted the Montie Three Gang members ought to be immediately and summarily revoked. No ifs and buts here.

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