Michael Ampong's Suit Is Wrong-Headed

It is a wrong-headed lawsuit that has absolutely no merit, besides drawing undeserved attention to the plaintiff. In fact, it is so daft that you begin to worry whether Michael Ampong really used to be the Greater-Accra Regional Director of Communications for Ghana's main opposition New Patriotic Party (NPP). We have often been told that the NPP is packed heavy with the best and the brightest of Ghanaian society. Alas, Mr. Ampong's suit against Mr. Kennedy Ohene Agyepong gives the lie to such vaunt. In the main, the suit seeks to compell the firebrand Assin-Central legislator to present whatever evidence he claims to have linking Messrs. Paul Afoko, Kwabena Agyei Agyepong, Kwadwo Mpiani and John Agyekum-Kufuor to the brutal acid-dousing assassination of Mr. Adams Mahama on May 20, 2015. The victim died the next day.

For those who may neither have known nor heard about the man, Mr. Adams Mahama, until his very barbaric assassination on Thursday, May 21, 2015, was the Regional Chairman of the New Patriotic Party. I personally got to know about the man barely 48 hours before the assassins' acid-dosing fell him. And shortly before his death, the deceased is widely alleged to have named his two assailants, both of whom are known to be card-carrying members of the New Patriotic Party. In other words, the assailants appear to have been contracted by some stalwarts inside the New Patriotic Party.

What is both problematic and pathetic about Mr. Ampong's lawsuit against Mr. Kennedy Agyapong is that the former Greater-Accra Communications Director of the NPP has not been specifically named as one of Mr. Agyapong's alleged masterminds behind the brutal murder of Mr. Adams Mahama (See "Ken Agyapong Sued Over Adams Mahama's Murder" Citifmonline.com / Ghanaweb.com 5/24/15). And so one can aptly surmise that Mr. Ampong may be working on behalf of some party principals, very likely one or two of the gentlemen publicly accused by the Assin-Central MP of having masterminded Mr. Mahama's death.

Well, the proxy plaintiff claims that what has compelled him to file his lawsuit is the mere fact of him being a citizen of Ghana with the right to facilitating the prompt apprehension of the alleged assassins of Mr. Adams Mahama and their rigorous prosecution. Now, this is quite quizzical because Mr. Ampong is clearly and flagrantly usurping the constitutional authority of the Ghana Police Service (GPS), the institution constitutionally mandated to investigate and bring criminal suspects to book. It is also quite certain that police investigators and their intelligence agents heard Mr. Agyapong make his admittedly outrageous accusation against the aforementioned gentlemen, including, of course, former President John Agyekum-Kufuor, perhaps the most influential living member of the New Patriotic Party.

And so why haven't personnel from either the Bureau of National Investigations (BNI), Ghana's equivalent of the US's Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI), or the Ghana Police Service (GPS) under whose jurisdiction Mr. Adams Mahama's death squarely falls? My terse prediction is that Mr. Ampong's lawsuit would be promptly dismissed, primarily because it has absolutely no merit, whatsoever. It is also rather presumptuous for the plaintiff to presume to unilaterally determine how our security agencies and their agents ought to handle the Mahama assassination.

Indeed, it would make far better sense, if the recently resigned Mr. Ampong had named Mr. Agyapong as one of the purportedly anonymous callers the former NPP communications operative claims had threatened his life, as a direct result of which he decided to resign his post.