Bagbin, Mahama and NDC Must Respect the Supreme Court – Part 1

I just finished reading the Full Text of Parliamentary Speaker Alban SK Bagbin’s so-called 62-point rejoinder to the Executive-Secretary of President Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo, to wit, Nana Bediatuo Asante, in which the relatively far less knowledgeable Speaker Bagbin quaintly and vacuously attempts to lecture the President and his New York University Law School-educated Constitutional Law Expert on the checks-and-balances that subtend Ghana’s Fourth Republican Democratic Culture (See “Full Text: Bagbin’s 62-Point Statement on Akufo-Addo’s Position on Anti-LGBT+ Bill” Ghanaweb.com 3/21/24).

Now, before we delve any deeper into the crux and the bone of contention at stake herein, it is imperative to remind those of our readers who are either too young and therefore may not remember the unenviable parliamentary track record of the retired National Democratic Congress-sponsored Member of Parliament for the Nadowli-Kaleo Constituency, in the Upper-West Region, that the Speaker of Ghana’s current 8^th Parliament spent most of his career as a Parliamentary Minority Leader wrapping red bands around his trapezoid head, decked in garish-red suits, and constantly and incessantly boycotting parliamentary proceedings, and urging his minions and associates to do the same whenever issues that did not hew to the ideological suasion and the kleptocratic political agenda of the National Democratic Congress were brought to the floor of the august House for debate and decision making.

In short, for most of the career of the man nicknamed the “Parliamentary Methuselah” by both his colleagues and the general Ghanaian public at large, the phrase “consensus building” never really featured in the vocabular of the University of Ghana Law School Graduate. And when he was Leader of the National Democratic Congress’ Parliamentary Majority Caucus or Conference, Mr. Bagbin spent most of his time and efforts frustrating the progressive policy proposals and the initiatives of House Members of the main opposition New Patriotic Party (NPP).

For example, it may be significant and interesting to ask why even as the de-fact one-party government in Ghana’s Fourth-Republican Parliament – from 1992 to 1996 – the National Democratic Congress-controlled Legislative Assembly never passed into law the globally infamous Repeal of the Criminal Libel and Sedition Law, a British-inherited legal instrument of torture, repression and harassment that had been used to silence political dissent, by both the long-departed British colonialists and the Rawlings-led ragtag regime of the National Democratic Congress, and it had to take Attorney-General and Minister of Justice Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo, under the democratically salutary, unimpeachable and foresighted tenure of the President John “The Gentle Giant” Agyekum-Kufuor-led government of the New Patriotic Party – 2001 to 2009 – to do precisely that?

For those of our readers who may not be privy to the contents of the landmark and the globally celebrated Repeal of the Criminal Libel and Sedition Law, it was the historically unprecedented passage of the latter legal instrument and its timely ratification into a principal pillar of Fourth Republican Ghanaian Democracy that facilitated the hitherto unforeseen and historically unprecedented Free Press that Ghanaian journalists, broadcasters and reporters enjoy today. Prior to the landmark passage and enactment of the Repeal of the Criminal Libel and Sedition Law, nearly every professionally formidable Ghanaian journalist who was perceived by the tandem and ragtag Jeremiah “Jerry” John Rawlings-led governments of the Provisional National Defense Council (PNDC) and the National Democratic Congress (NDC), who called the government out on its patently infelicitous and autocratic conduct spent a considerable torture time behind bars – the most obvious names that readily come to mind here and now are Messrs. Abdul-Malik Kweku Baako and Abdul-Rahman Harruna-Attah.

It was during this most inglorious and unenviable period in our beloved country’s history that the Serial and the Dynastic Presidential Candidate of the National Democratic Congress, namely, Mr. John “Ford Expedition Payola” Dramani Mahama, acquired the presently near-forgotten sobriquet or nickname of Chairman Rawlings’ “Shit-Bomber,” primarily because, first, as the Rawlings-appointed Deputy Communications Minister and, subsequently, the substantive Communications Minister, the Bole-Bamboi native from the Gonja-West Constituency, in the Akufo-Addo-created Savannah Region, was best known for instructing sanitation tanker drivers to literally flood the premises of media establishments that were perceived to not subscribe to the populist and faux-socialist ideology of the National Democratic Congress with raw and untreated human waste.

Maybe some of our students at the University of Development Studies (UDS) may need to research this most depraved and irredeemably scandalous period in Ghana’s postcolonial history as topics for their undergraduate theses and long essays and, even, postgraduate-level dissertations, if none of them have done so yet as of this writing. Of particular or special interest is the impact, both long-term and short-term, that the Mahama Policy Agenda of Shit-Bombing has had on the country’s ecosystem, in terms of the spread of such environmental hygiene hazards and diseases as cholera, diarrhea and malaria and other related diseases. You see, the sort of problems with the practice of constitutional democracy that Speaker Bagbin cynically and comically writes about in his so-called “62-Point Statement on Akufo-Addo’s Position on Anti-LGBT+ Bill” are primarily the legacy of three decades of P/NDC hijacking of the rule of law and order in postcolonial Ghana.

*Visit my blog at: KwameOkoampaAhoofeJr

By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., PhD
Professor Emeritus, Department of English
SUNY-Nassau Community College
Garden City, New York
March 21, 2024
E-mail: [email protected]