Does Gaslighting Martin Amidu See Crushing Defeat for NDC in Election 2024? – Part 12 (Final)

Amidu’s claim that Mr. Albert Kan-Dapaah, the Minister of National Security, during a seminar on the “Impact of Disinformation on Electoral Integrity, Peace and Security in Africa,” sometime in October last year – the 2024 UDS-sponsored Harmattan School Guest Lecturer does not specify the location or venue – threatened the use of an election-rigging surveillance system or mechanism, all too characteristic of dictators and autocratic regimes, once again, conveniently ignores to mention the fact that but for the prompt and the vehement protestations of Ghanaian opposition party leaders and political activists in the country, in the runup to the 2016 General Election, Mr. John Kudalor, the extant Inspector-General (IGP) of the Ghana Police Service (GPS), would have completely shut down Internet Services for several days, both immediately before and shortly after that year’s watershed General Election.

Mr. Kudalor’s rationale for such a scandalous measure, as the local Ghanaian media widely reported it, was simply because this morally and politically inexcusable mode of total Information Blackout had worked to great and the desired effect in such globally infamous Continental African Dictatorships as Gabon, Congo-Brazzaville and Uganda. Mr. Kan-Dapaah’s weird and scandalous decision, according to the rabidly anti-New Patriotic Party (NPP) propaganda tout of the country’s main opposition political party, the National Democratic Congress (NDC), had been predicated on the present Akufo-Addo-appointed National Security Minister’s allegation, forensically unproven and purely in the imagination of Mr. Amidu, that some specifically named “individuals in academia, civil society and the media [were] leveraging their influence in society to incite a coup to destabilize the country through speading mis-/disinformation.” The critic does not provide his readers with the names that he claims had been specifically mentioned by Mr. Kan-Dapaah at the aforesaid confabulation.

No doubt, the preceding allegation and/or argument by Martin Amidu would have been more balanced and far more credible, as well, if the rabid and inveterate critic of Akufo-Addo had also significantly recalled the very open and brazen threat of the criminal sexual violation of then Chief Justice Georgina Theodora Wood, as well as the threats of the physical dismemberment of those of her widely perceived non-NDC-hewing or leaning associates on the Supreme Court of Ghana, almost exclusively judges appointed to the Apex Court by former President John “The Gentle Giant” Agyekum-Kufuor, by some locally infamous media goons widely alleged to be in the pay and/or on the payroll of then President John “The SADA Gravy-Train Driving” Dramani Mahama, the so-called Montie Trio/Three, whose intemperate and violent public threats were unsurprisingly staunchly backed by the entire panoply of the Mahama Cabinet Appointees, notable among them Mrs. Betty Mould-Iddrisu, Mrs. Nana Oye Lithur, and Mrs. Elizabeth Ofosu-Adjare, at the time the Minister for Culture and Tourism and the Creative Arts.

It is therefore absolutely nothing short of downright ludicrous for Martin Amidu to mordantly accuse President Akufo-Addo of running a dictatorship in the country. To be certain, but for the historically unprecedented Akufo-Addo-crafted Repeal of the Criminal Libel Law, a veritable instrument of physical torture and unremitting political repression of free-speech rights and the right to nonviolently protest unjust laws and policy measures, inherited from the British colonial regime, while the now-President Akufo-Addo was the Agyekum-Kufuor-appointed Attorney-General and Minister of Justice, Martin Amidu would almost definitely be “cooling his heels” smack behind bars at a medium- or a maximum-security prison house for writing and publishing some of the scandalous and incendiary anti-government screeds and tirades that he has been incessantly and recklessly pumping into the local media mainstream for quite a considerable while now, material that he would almost certainly not have dared to fathom, much less pen and publish under the watch and the unspeakably extortionate tenure of the Rawlings-led government of the National Democratic Congress, of which the insufferably acerbic Martin Amidu was the bootlicking career Deputy Attorney-General and Deputy Minister of Justice.

At any rate, the members of the University of Ghana branch or chapter of the University Teachers’ Association of Ghana (UTAG) who allegedly took umbrage with the afore-referenced statement reportedly made by the National Security Minister, were only preaching to the proverbial choir, when they issued the following statement in response to both Mr. Kan-Dapaah and all the key national-security operatives of the Akufo-Addo Administration: “The antidote of [to?] coups and military interventions in politics are good governance, [genuine] fight against corruption, proper management of the economy, and the implementation of proactive pro-poor policies, that can help bridge the gap between the poor and the rich, as well as create a vibrant Middle[-]Class society.”

Indeed, had they done just a little soul-searching, the UG-UTAG executives who so lividly and impulsively fired off the aforesaid press release to the President, would almost certainly have given themselves a little humble pause before proceeding to make such theatrical clowns and outright buffoons of themselves. It goes without saying that relatively speaking, it is only the Neoliberal and the Free-Market oriented governments of the New Patriotic Party, respectively led by former President John “The Gentle Giant” Agyekum-Kufuor and incumbent President Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo, that have come closest to successfully delivering the sort of good governance so pontifically prescribed by the members of the University of Ghana’s chapter of the University Teachers’ Association of Ghana and their pontiffs and dons to the key operatives of the present Akufo-Addo Government.

The historically incontrovertible fact of the matter is that far too many Ghanaians have lost their lives under National Democratic Congress-sponsored and supervised elections than under any other political-party establishment in Postcolonial Ghana. Yet a characteristically disingenuous and pathologically cynical Martin ABK Amidu pretends as if more deaths have occurred under the sponsorship and the electoral supervision of the relatively much more peaceful and socially responsible leadership of the New Patriotic Party. And by the way, most election-related deaths – and these are relatively few and far between – that have occurred under the watch or tenure of the New Patriotic Party have mostly been agent-provocateurs or casualties deliberately sponsored by a strategically devious New Patriotic Party-baiting leadership of the National Democratic Congress to snatch and stuff ballot boxes, in a treasonous bid to nullifying the inalienable democratic will of the Ghanaian people. It is also quite obvious that Martin Amidu and those who think like him are morally bankrupt and irredeemable National Democratic Congress’ political-machine operatives.

*Visit my blog at: KwameOkoampaAhoofeJr

By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., PhD
Professor Emeritus, Department of English
SUNY-Nassau Community College
Garden City, New York
February 24, 2024
E-mail: [email protected]