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

The CODEC placcard that piqued my utter disdain and amusement was captioned as follows: "Nana Why The Silence?" In the usual half-hearted Ghanaian way of doing things, the placcard had no question tag/mark to its query. Actually, if these National Democratic Congress (NDC) hirelings were not as pathologically dishonest and disingenuous as they have always been, they would have noticed that Nana Akufo-Addo's Communications Director, Nana Akomea, was right in their midst.

Still, what was unmistakably silly about the entire anti-Osafo-Maafo protest demonstration last Wednesday, March 4, was the outrageously facile presumption that, somehow, the former Kufuor Sports and Finance Minister had no mind of his own and had to, perforce, be speaking on behalf of the 2016 Presidential Candidate of the main opposition New Patriotic Party (NPP), anytime that Mr. Yaw Osafo-Maafo, a man who is a bit older than Nana Akufo-Addo, makes a remark that is deemed by his political opponents to be in poor taste.

It is also rather ironic that the official sponsors of the demonstration, the so-called Coalition for the Defense of Equal Citizenship, has as its chief patron, the Mahama-led government of the National Democratic Congress, an Anlo-Ewe founded and dominated political machine that has made an enviable art of meticulously and systematically dividing and persecuting the ethnic-Akan Ghanaian majority populace, including the Mafia-style abduction and summary execution of Akan-descended superior court judges.

I am also intrigued by the spirited, albeit patently hollow, attempt by the so-called Convener of CODEC, to brazenly deny that some of the New Patriotic Party leaders who participated in Wednesday's demonstration, including Ablekuma-West MP, Mrs. Ursula Owusu-Ekuful, were heckled and chased off the demonstration route by apparent goons and hirelings of the National Democratic Congress. We know the Ablekuma-West MP has credibility, because there is incontrovertible evidence on record indicating that the firebrand feminist-radical lawyer was once brutally assaulted by goons and thugs allegedly hired by Mr. Ade Coker, the Yoruba-descended Greater-Accra Chairman of the National Democratic Congress, for daring to "illegally cross constituency lines" to campaign for a fellow New Patriotic Party parliamentary candidate.

In his bald-headed denial, Mr. Tamakloe claimed that the "heckling" and "chasing out" allegations by the well-known and recognized NPP stalwarts could not be true because "Some members of the NPP, including Dominic Nitiwul [MP for Bimbilla] and Mike Oquaye [the former Dome-Kwabenya NPP parliamentary candidate] were part of the protest from the beginning to the end." We generally don't doubt the fact of some NPP stalwarts having been with the protesters from the starting point of the march's route to its scheduled end-point, or destination, except that we also have very strong doubts that the CODEC Convener had the event so closely monitored that he had been able to maintain a watchful eye on each and every one of the key NPP operatives who participated in the protest.

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