It is very obvious that the press statement read to the media by the Parliamentary Minority Leader, Mr. Haruna Iddrisu, was not adequately thought through, else it would not be fraught with such an unacceptably high level of contradictions. For example, at the very tail end of the press statement, the National Democratic Congress’ Member of Parliament for Tamale-Central, in the Northern Region, says that “Ghana belongs to all of us and so shall we all stand to defend the democracy we have all labored for.”
Maybe somebody more levelheaded with a keen sense of justice needs to remind the man whose Master of Sociology Degree was summarily withdrawn from him by the members of the Academic Council of the country’s flagship academy, the University of Ghana, Legon, some twelve years ago, that, if, indeed, Fourth-Republican Ghana belonged to all of us Ghanaian citizens, Indemnity Clauses would not have been specially and specifically inserted into the country’s 1992 Constitution to ensure the exclusive protection of the certified Human Butchers who constitute the core leadership of the National Democratic Congress, beginning with the party’s founding-father, namely, Chairman Jerry John Rawlings (See “We Walked Out On A Tyrant, Despotic and Authoritarian Akufo-Addo” Modernghana.com 2/20/20).
Maybe the scofflaw likes of the Parliamentary Minority Leader need to explain to the rest of the nation why an unprecedented number of prominent Ghanaian leaders, including an incumbent President John Evans Atta-Mills; Mr. Joseph Boakye Danquah-Adu, then the New Patriotic Party’s Member of Parliament for Akyem-Abuakwa-North; and Mr. Peter Kenyenso, extant Mahama-appointed Nkwanta-South District Chief Executive, who got assassinated point-blank range, by the way; then there was also the acid-dousing assassination of Mr. Adams Mahama, then the Upper-East Regional Chairman of the New Patriotic Party, all under the watch of former President John Dramani Mahama, and never in a single instance were those responsible for these clear-cut contract assassinations promptly brought to book or justice.
Now, predictably, the National Democratic Congress’ Parliamentary Minority Leader would have the rest of the nation and the global community believe that the life of one individual journalist, the late Mr. Ahmed Hussein-Suale, was more important than the lives of the four savagely slain Ghanaian leaders named above, including an extant bona fide leader of the then-ruling National Democratic Congress and the substantive President of the Sovereign Democratic Republic of Ghana. No wonder then, that Vice-President John Dramani Mahama would tell Ghanaian citizens at the time of the “mysterious” passing of Professor Atta-mills that his immediate boss and the man who had specially handpicked him as his running-mate and for the Vice-Presidency had been opportunely liquidated by a wisdom-filled inscrutable Divine Providence.
It is also rather absurd that the leaders of the very political party that staunchly backed the Montie Three NDC-sponsored media propagandists who wantonly rained insults and other forms of verbal abuse on some justices of the Supreme Court, including the very public and obscene threat to have then Chief Justice Georgina Theodora Wood savagely raped in broad daylight, would today be pontifically and self-righteously decrying the purported absence of Human Rights in Ghanaian society. We must also not forget that in the vehement and vitriolic assault on then Chief Justice Wood and some of her Supreme Court Associates, nearly every woman cabinet appointee in the Mahama government, among them Nana Oye Lithur and Mrs. Betty Mould-Iddrisu, staunchly backed the would-be rapists of Chief Justice Wood.
And guess what, Dear Reader? For good measure, then-President John Dramani Mahama would ride roughshod over the statutory powers of the Supreme Court by summarily ordering the Montie Three agitprop thugs to be released from the Nsawam Medium-Security Prison, after the comical performance of a genuflecting rubberstamping charade by the membership of the Mahama-constituted National Council of State. For many of us Ghanaian-born American citizens presently living under the fascistic and terror-charged Presidency of Mr. Donald John Trump, it is former President John Dramani Mahama whose supervision of a Mafia-style assassination camp that was Ghana under the previous Mahama-led government of the National Democratic Congress that closely approximates the present anti-African and Third World White-Supremacist Trumpian faux democracy.
It is also rather nightmarishly absurd for Haruna Iddrisu to cite the US State Department under the Presidency of Donald Trump to castigate what the reprobate leadership of the most violent political party in Ghana, according to both former President Mahama and Ms. Anita D’Souza, the National Women’s Organizer of the National Democratic Congress, purports to be attempts at “Voter Suppression” in the electoral strongholds of the NDC. You see, instead of caustically castigating President Akufo-Addo for failing to implement the totality of the recommendations of the blue-ribbon Short Commission Report on the Ayawaso-West Wuogon Byelection Hostilities, the NDC’s Parliamentary Minority Leader needs to tell the Ghanaian people and the members of the global community at large, precisely how many commissions of enquiry either Monsieur John Evans Atta-Mills or Monsieur John “Kanazoe” Dramani Mahama established in the wake of byelection hostilities at Talensi, Wassa-Amenfi, Atiwa (Akyem-Kwabeng) and Akyem-Akwatia, among dozens of others.
I also love this rather crassly ignorant quote on the part of the NDC Parliamentary Minority Leader from immortalized US President Thomas Jefferson: “I have sworn upon the altar of God, eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man.” Does Mr. Haruna Iddrisu fully appreciate the gross contradiction of the preceding quote, by virtue of the fact that Mr. Jefferson wrote this while holding dozens of Africans in chains on his sprawling Virginia plantation as chattel slaves? You see, Dear Reader, this is the kind of intellectual basket case that passes for leadership among the top hierarchy operatives of Ghana’s main opposition National Democratic Congress.
*visit my blog at: kwameokoampaahoofe.wordpress.com Ghanaffairs
By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., PhD
English Department, SUNY-Nassau
Garden City, New York
E-mail: okoampaahoofe@optimum.net