By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.

I don’t particularly like any of the key operatives of the main opposition National Democratic Congress (NDC), but one thing is incontrovertibly clear. It is time for the members and supporters, as well as sympathizers, of the ruling New Patriotic Party (NPP) to quit their reprisal politics of equalization and get back to the heavy-lifting work of nation-building. The decision by the government to establish a task force with the objective of retrieving stolen state properties from members of the erstwhile Mahama-led regime of the National Democratic Congress must proceed on schedule. But it must be approached objectively and legally, which means that it must not be tainted with any acts of vendetta. This is time for justice fair and square, not witch-hunting.

Still, Mr. Johnson Asiedu-Nketia, the NDC’s General-Secretary, would be grossly mistaken if he and his associates at the party’s headquarters think and/or believe that they can intimidate any members of the Akufo-Addo Administration with plangent and pontifical press releases pretending as if the incidents of violence that broke out across the country, in the wake of the epic electoral victory of the New Patriotic Party in the 2016 general election was unidirectional, with operatives, members, supporters and sympathizers of the ruling party doing all the alleged assaults and beatings, and their main political opponents just sitting duck and passively absorbing all the blows and other forms of physical and verbal attacks.

Nothing could be farther from the truth. The fact of the matter is that the National Democratic Congress has a long record of violence and naked impunity going back some three decades. And so it can be nothing short of the downright preposterous for the man who is popularly known as General Mosquito to deviously attempt to fault “some elements close to President Akufo-Addo” for being exclusively responsible for the raging pockets of politically oriented violence raging across the country. Needless to say, in the recent past, some NDC hirelings among the ranks of the NPP collaborated in a bid to portraying the then-Candidate Akufo-Addo as a rabidly violent man who did not deserve to be elected president of our august Republic. Alas, unfortunately for career political thugs like Messrs. Asiedu-Nketia, Ade-Coker and Adams, this strategy did not fly with Ghanaian voters.

And so it is rather amusing for General Mosquito to be theatrically decrying “the actions of criminal elements loyal to President Nana Akufo-Addo.” Every Ghanaian old enough to remember the catastrophic events of two years ago, knows fully well that it was not elements loyal to then-Candidate Akufo-Addo that assassinated Mr. Adams Mahama, the staunch Akufo-Addo loyalist and Upper-East Regional Chairman of the then-main opposition New Patriotic Party, at the time of his acid-dousing death. Today, even as I write, the assassins of Mr. Mahama, including the younger brother of the indefinitely suspended National Chairman of the New Patriotic Party, have yet to be punished to the fullest extent of the law.

Then there was also that young Akufo-Addo loyalist by the name of Mr. Saddique Abubakar, if memory serves yours truly accurately, who was brutally stabbed to death in the Kumasi township of Asewase by New Patriotic Party elements with ties to some unnamed key operatives of the then-ruling National Democratic Congress. We have also shockingly had then-President John Dramani Mahama make light of these most tragic events while on a campaign tour of the Volta Region, such as when he gestured in a peek-a-boo show of his quintessential “wickedness” and “spiritual evilness” – my profuse apologies to Ms. Otiko Djaba – and taunted Messrs. Akufo-Addo and Bawumia as follows: “Where is your Chairman?”

Well, Mr. Asiedu-Nketia has publicly and categorically threatened to destabilize the country, if the Akufo-Addo government carries out its sacred mandate of retrieving all state-owned properties forensically sustainably established to have been illegally taken or stolen by operatives of the erstwhile Mahama government. He had better be prepared to put his howitzer where his mouth is. For no amount of bluster or grandstanding would deter the Akufo-Addo Flagstaff House from jealously protecting the Ghanaian taxpayer’s properties and the integrity of the nation’s sovereignty at large.

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