By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.
Garden City, New York
June 2, 2015
E-mail: okoampaahoofe@optimum.net

I knew that his long silence merely covered his inescapable culpability; and so when a couple of days ago, the General-Secretary of the New Patriotic Party (NPP) decided to break his silence, it was all-too-predictable to me that Mr. Kwabena Agyei Agyepong was only bound to further complicate matters for Chairman Paul Afoko and himself (See "Adams Mahama Threatened Us - Kwabena Agyepong" Vibeghana.com / Ghanaweb.com 6/1/15). In the main, Mr. Agyepong alleges that the slain Upper-East Regional Chairman of the NPP, Mr. Adams Mahama, had seriously threatened the life and safety of his apparently inveterate internal political opponents, and even warned Messrs. Afoko and Agyepong against setting foot in his Bolgatanga headquarters.

The deceased man, according to Mr. Agyepong, had virulently accused both the NPP National Chairman and the General-Secretary of being rabidly anti-Akufo-Addo. Now, let us take these two allegations one after the other. My gut reaction, or response, here is that both allegations are rather lame and pathetic. Secondly, they tell us far more about the leadership caliber of Messrs. Afoko and Agyepong than pointing towards any innately violent tendencies on the part of the late Mr. Adams Mahama, as Mr. Agyepong would have his supporters and sympathizers believe. And on the latter score, the logical question is as follows: When Mr. Adams Mahama virulently threatened Messrs. Afoko and Agyepong, what disciplinary structures of the New Patriotic Party did both the National Chairman and the General-Secretary appeal to for redress?

I am quite certain that there are established guidelines and standing committees, as well as standing orders, for dealing with issues bordering on administrative insubordination, either perceived or real. Unfortunately, what we find here is that rather than appeal to the relevant officials and/or authorities within the party hierarchy, Messrs. Afoko and Agyepong presumptuously decided to take the law into their own hands by unnecessarily forcing a confrontation with Mr. Adams Mahama.

In other words, it clearly appears that rather than meticulously, intelligently and diplomatically appropriating laid-down channels for venting and ironing out whatever differences the NPP National Chairman and the General-Secretary may have had with the slain Mr. Adams Mahama, both Messrs. Afoko and Agyepong imperiously decided to bulldoze their way into the Upper-East jurisdiction of Mr. Adams Mahama, welcome or unwelcome. Now, that surely "sounds" more in keeping with the radical temperament for which most of the key operatives of the National Democratic Congress (NDC) are globally notorious. Mr. Agyepong also rather risibly alleges that but for his own personal intervention, albeit in a crassly self-interested manner, Mr. Mahama would have been arrested by the Bolgatanga police and thrown in jail for grossly unruly behavior.

Well, from the little that I have been able to garner from the media about the slain man, I have absolutely no doubt that Mr. Mahama was far from behaviorally angelic or mild-mannered. But in this case, it clearly appears that the battle was literally taken to his doorstep unprovoked - no pun is intended here, of course - rather than vice-versa. At any rate, a relative of mine who listened to Chairman Afoko speak to the issue on Peace-Fm Radio, on the morning of the brutal acid-dousing assassination of Mr. Adams Mahama, came away with the impression that the original intention of the criminal suspects was simply to threaten the life and safety of the victim without necessarily causing his summary liquidation.

Somehow, according to my relative, in the heat of intense exchanges between him and his would-be assassins, Mr. Mahama had proven himself to be too tough to easily intimidate. This, in the opinion of my relative, was what forced Mr.Gregory Afoko, the younger ex-convict brother of Chairman Paul Afoko, to promptly execute Mr. Adams Mahama. Needless to say, any which way one looks at it, as I have maintained time and again, Messrs. Afoko and Agyepong clearly have their hands incarnadine.

Indeed, even as I write, two purported New Patriotic Party activists in the Prestea-Bogoso Constituency of the Western Region are reported to have been arrested by the Bogoso police and charged with "raining unprintable insults" on Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo, the NPP flagbearer for the 2016 general election. What is significant here is not the arrest of the two men, reported to have been among a gang of six men, but the well-sourced report that these anti-Akufo-Addo character assassins had actually been dispatched by Mr. Agyepong to do the dirty work of the "Bolgatanga Duo," that is, both Messrs. Afoko and Agyepong.

Mr. Agyepong also recently claimed before a reported gathering of NPP regional chairpersons in Kumasi, the Asante Regional Capital, that their slain internal political opponent had accused the two top NPP administrators of being rabidly anti-Akufo-Addo, almost as if this were some apocryphal body of new knowledge. A couple of days, or so, ago I urgently called for the NPP leadership to set up its own investigative panel to enquire into the extent to which the Gregory Afoko vigilante group may be only a minuscule party of an extensive nationwide network established by the anti-Akufo-Addo forces among the rank-and-file membership of the New Patriotic Party. I still firmly stand by this judgment call.

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