Bobie Ansah Is Disingenuous on Press Freedom and Galamsey Fight Under Akufo-Addo

Contrary to what Mr. Kwabena Bobie Ansah would have the rest of the members of the global community believe (See “Bobie Ansah Writes an Open Letter to BBC” Modernghana.com 5/9/22), while, indeed, the battle against Galamsey, or illegal small-scale mining, has not even been nearly half as successful as it could have been, with dozens of highly placed government and ruling party officials caught up in a vicious cycle of greed and a flagrant breach of public trust, nevertheless, relatively speaking, at least President Akufo-Addo has demonstrated a serious will to fighting off this environmentally destructive and an existential menace in remarkable ways that cannot be said of former President Mahama and his previous National Democratic Congress’ regime.

To be certain, shortly after he had decisively lost the 2016 Presidential Election, Mr. Mahama went on an electioneering campaign rampage of a kind that could be aptly termed as a “scorched-earth assault,” by vehemently and unconscionably promoting wantonly predatory Galamsey activities all over the country, but especially in the northern half of the country, on the seditiously cynical grounds that the newly elected Akufo-Addo Administration, in power for less than six months, had already scandalously demonstrated that it had absolutely no clue about how to create gainful employment for the very youths whom the previous Mahama regime had adamantly and flatly refused to educate beyond the Junior High School Level, on grounds that the cash-strapped economy of the country could scarcely afford the same.

In actuality, having thoroughly and effectively and criminally bankrupted the John Agyekum-Kufuor-established National Health Insurance Scheme (NHIS), the then-President John Dramani Mahama would sneer and literally thumb his nose by insisting that the feasibility of the establishment of a Fee-Free Senior High School System existed only in the veritable pipedream of a desperate politician who was hell-bent on grabbing power at all costs. Yes, President Akufo-Addo has not been nearly half as successful as he could have been on the Galamsey battlefront, but it also equally cannot be gainsaid that the rivers and streams in the country are much cleaner than they had been under the previous Mahama regime.

We must also bear in mind that the Galamsey predatory environmental menace, with the witheringly destructive Chinese input or aspect to it, has been going on at full-throttle at least since 1996, with the criminal complicity of the Chairman Jeremiah “Jerry” John Rawlings-led democratically elected government of the National Democratic Congress. Which means that there is a lot of room to cover, by way of a thorough “housecleaning” exercise, before the country can begin to realize any remarkable change in the reclamation of our forestry resources, waterbodies and the rejuvenation of the entirety of the environment at large. The economy may also be experiencing a lot of challenges but, at least, the lights are steadily on for most days of the week and enterprising Ghanaians are also able to eke out a decent living, unlike the smugly Mahama-supervised era of perennial power outage, otherwise known as “Dumsor,” when Ghanaians were disdainfully lectured down to about the need to “creatively” work around the indeterminable vagaries of Dumsor, instead of unwisely and incessantly complaining about the woefully inadequate supply of electricity.

As well, it is important to highlight the fact that instead of playing the role of a patriotic and loyal opposition political establishment, the leadership of the country’s main opposition party, the National Democratic Congress (NDC), has been caught smack involved in the criminal abduction of volunteers of foreign Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs), such as the three white-Canadian young women who were caught in the strategic web of NDC-sponsored and orchestrated terrorism in the Asante regional capital of Kumasi several years ago. In that globally embarrassing incident, had the Canadian government not promptly stepped in to guarantee the safety of its citizens, these three young women would likely have ended up in the same horrific and grisly manner as the kidnapped and brutally slain Takoradi Girls.

When they have not been neck-deep engaged in spreading false propaganda or fake news to make the Akufo-Addo Government seem worse than it actually is, vis-à-vis its performance track-record, the leadership of the National Democratic Congress have been caught planning criminal activities aimed at destabilizing the country, as a means of getting themselves returned to Jubilee House by hook or crook. Indeed, even as I write, Mr. Samuel Ofosu-Ampofo, the National Chairman of the National Democratic Congress, as well as several of his associates, stands indicted on charges of attempting to destabilize the country. That the judicial authorities do not seem to be courageous enough in promptly bringing these powerful criminal politicians to book, is what the likes of Mr. Bobie Ansah ought to be talking about and discussing on the radio and television airwaves all over the country, were they really worth even half the weight of their professional designation.

Finally, in the case of the shuttering or the closures of dozens of radio stations around the country, this was primarily done due to the fact that many of these commercial and community electronic broadcast stations were in egregious violation of the licensing and tax laws of the country. It also well appears that the overwhelming majority of these stations were being allowed to operate by the previous Mahama regime, so long as they allowed themselves to be strategically used to further the political interests and agenda of the National Democratic Congress, a powerful communications strategy that the presently ruling New Patriotic Party has been extremely slow in catching on to. Then also, the undisciplined proliferation of these stations was cluttering the limited international bandwidth share of the country and interfering with other sensitive national security usage of the same.

On the whole, and I have stated this innumerable times in dozens of previous columns, the New Patriotic Party is relatively more liberal and far more protective of Ghanaian journalists than the far more dictatorial and ham-handed operatives of the country’s main opposition National Democratic Congress. You see, what the operatives of the National Democratic Congress do better than their New Patriotic Party counterparts is the inimitable ability to pretend to be more liberal that they practically are. In other words, it is all a sheer game of make-believe or pretense on the part of the relatively far less liberal political and ideological establishment. The “Shit-Bombing” history of the Rawlings-led National Democratic Congress effectively set the stage and the tone. And for most of the time since then, all that the Mahama Posse has been about has been to simply devise clever ways of media-friendly pretense. That’s all.

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By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., PhD

English Department, SUNY-Nassau

Garden City, New York

June 25, 2022

E-mail: [email protected]