Shun June 4

Prof. Mike Oquaye (l) with Dr. Nyaho Tamakloe

SECOND DEPUTY Speaker of Parliament, Prof. Mike Oquaye, has cautioned responsible and well-meaning Ghanaians to stay away from the 30th celebration of the infamous June 4th uprising in 1979, which falls today, and the so-called 31st December Movement of 1981.

According to him, the celebration would bring back memories of the untold hardships, trauma and barbaric treatments meted out to innocent citizens.

As some historians had it, the 1979 revolution, led by ex-president Jerry John Rawlings, sought to radically transform and cleanse society of wrongdoings which hampered economic growth. It was tagged “The Revolutionaries vs The Enemies Of The Revolution”.

Giving a public lecture on the topic “Revolutionary Politics in Ghana” on Tuesday in Accra, Prof. Oquaye, who doubles as the MP for the Dome-Kwabenya Constituency, stated that “if the revolutionaries had anything worthwhile to offer, they should have addressed the manifold and manifest problems under which the legal system was crumbling, where judges took evidence in long hand, coupled with lack of stationery, lack of training for judicial service personnel, poor salaries at all levels, etc”.

The programme was organized by the Ga-Dangbe Forward Movement.

Also known in political circles as the Apparatchiki, he noted that instead of finding solutions to what he described as the glaring problems, the revolutionaries rather created a parallel system which in due course, succumbed to the abyss of legal inconsequence.

Furthermore, he said that though the 31st December revolution was a call for the evolution of a new democracy, “we ran in Alice in Wonderland circles ad infinitim and ad nauseam; yet democracy eluded us”.

“The Defence Committees woefully failed to metamorphose into the national structures of democratic governance as was trumpeted at the early stages of the revolution. In considering the actual dynamics of popular participation under the PNDC, we observed that the Defence Committees failed to evolve into permanent, viable and respectable institutions of representation of the people at the local, district, regional and national levels as envisaged,” he added.

Prof. Ocquaye explained that “if June 4th had not occurred, the people of Ghana would not have accepted for one minute, 31st December”. June 4th, he maintained, came to close the eyes of some people.

“June 4th was a trick; it was a rehearsal to usher in the real revolution, that is the 31st December movement,” he indicated.

Meanwhile, he noted that running a government was not a macho affair so former president Rawlings should stop his 'machoistic approach', and also commanding the sitting president to take swift actions against past government officials.

Chairman of the occasion, Ghana's former Ambassador to Serbia and Montenegro, Dr. Nyaho Tamakloe, pointed out that whoever is trying to take “us back should be prepared because we shall fight him”.

He as well called on President J.E.A. Mills to set up a commission of inquiry to look into properties of past governments, “if he really wants to tell us he is clean; which I doubt”. Dr. Tamakloe assured that come 2012, the New Patriotic Party (NPP) would win the elections and under the leadership of Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo Addo, Ghana would be better of than under Prof. Mills.

By Nathaniel Y.Yankson