By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.
Garden City, New York
Feb. 16, 2016
E-mail: okoampaahoofe@optimum.net

The apparently open season of physical assaults on politicians, especially parliamentarians and parliamentary candidates, ought to be a wakeup call for our leaders to shift focus from cynically pursuing their own socioeconomic interests to taking care of the greater interests of the general Ghanaian citizenry. As the level of unemployment skyrockets through the roof, literally speaking, and ordinary citizens become increasingly desperate, it will become all-too-logical to attack our politicians who clearly appear to be living high on the proverbial hog. Matters are not helped the least bit, when you have well-heeled politicians like Mr. Kennedy Ohene Agyapong publicly flaunting and bragging about their wealth and wanton exploits with some of our womenfolk. It does not make us seem like a civilized society.

In the latest of such attacks, Ms. Barbara Asher Ayisi, the New Patriotic Party’s parliamentary candidate for Cape Coast North, was reportedly assaulted in the sacred privacy of her own home by a 22-year-old man whose name has yet to be revealed by law-enforcement authorities. According to news reports, the young would-be-assassin carried an iron rod and a knife to the home of the target of his intended victim. It was not clear to yours truly, as of this writing, the extent of injuries, if any, sustained by the targeted victim of assault. What we have been told by media reports is that neighbors managed to subdue the assailant with a flurry of punishing blows before local police personnel arrived at the crime scene.

There is the temptation to side with the evidently beneficent vigilantes by observing that the assailant, or would-be assassin, deserved the sort of severe beatings he is alleged to have received. But here also is a striking indication of the breakdown of civility and civilization, so to speak. In a functional democracy, the right thing to do ought to have been for those effecting what is termed as a “citizen’s arrest” of the assailant, to have applied just enough force to subdue the assailant while these good Samaritans awaited the arrival and intervention of law-enforcement officials. Subjecting the assailant to the level of beatings he is alleged to have been meted, could easily have resulted in his death, thereby creating the possibility of another equally heinous crime – that of homicide. About the only situation in which homicide would have been justifiable would be one in which the assailant carried a deadly weapon, such that a Darwinian context of kill-or-be-killed was deemed to have been created, thereby inevitably necessitating the prompt and immediate liquidation of the assailant.

Where matters also get a bit weird and downright bizarre, is Ms. Ayisi’s rather farcical claim that she has studied enough psychology to be able to authoritatively contradict law-enforcement authorities who suspected that the assailant was clinically insane and needed to be committed to a mental asylum for the requisite observation and treatment. Unless she is a licensed clinical psychologist or psychotherapist, Ms. Ayisi’s assertion cannot be taken seriously. But, of course, it is also quite understandable that she would stake such an at once scandalous and outrageous claim. Very likely, such knee-jerk reaction stems from the fact of the victim’s having been deeply shocked and traumatized by the entire episode.

Indeed, the victim may herself be in dire and immediate need of medical observation and treatment for her trauma; and I hope she has been advised to promptly do so. Needless to say, it is not her judgment call or right to determine whether or not her assailant was psychologically sound or unsound at the time of her attack. That judgment belongs entirely to the specialists.

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