Bagbin, Mahama and NDC Must Respect the Supreme Court – Part 3 (Final)

What the Bagbin Gang of National Democratic Congress’ bully politicians either woefully fail to appreciate or simply conveniently refuses to understand is that for 20 protracted years, Ghanaians fiercely fought against the unilateral and the self-righteous imposition of the faux-socialist will of the AK-47-cradling disgruntled and frustrated junior-rank personnel – largely Rawlings and Kojo Tsikata-recruited Boys’ Company Thugs – of the Ghana Armed Forces (GAF) and their equally disgruntled and frustrated allies – also low-ranked personnel – among members of the so-called intelligentsia, the civil and public service and blue-collar workers, the latter of which group largely and literally blew with the direction of the faux-revolutionary winds of the late Chairman Jeremiah “Jerry” John Rawlings-led Provisional National Defense Council (PNDC) junta, preceded nearly three years by the equally bloody and the extortionate Rawlings-led short-lived junta of the Armed Forces Revolutionary Council (AFRC).

The preceding Darwinian state of affairs has been further complicated by the fact that the present Fourth-Republican Constitution of Ghana woefully lacks the kind of integrity and the credibility of the preceding three Postcolonial Republican Constitutions of the country, namely, the 1957, the 1969 and the 1979 constitutions, all of which had the singular salient feature of prohibiting non-full-blooded Ghanaian citizens from acceding to the Presidency. Hitherto, a Presidential Candidate had to be at least a third-generation Ghanaian citizen by birth from both sides of their ancestry.

Surprisingly but nonetheless, predictably, none of these faux radical-revolutionary conservative propagators of “proper sexual health and family values” and conservators of “Ghanaian core cultural values” and, one presumes, preservers our bona fide Ghanaian identity and moral values, have raised this critical question of the opportunistic “bastardization” and/or the “mogrelization” of traditional Ghanaian civic identity for the convenience of just one half-Scottish and half-Ghanaian waif. Rather, cynical and Machiavellian politicians like Messrs. Bagbin, Johnson “The Mosquito” Asiedu-Nketia, John “The Ouagadougou-Nkonfem Flying” Dramani Mahama and Samuel George Nartey – aka Sam George – to name only a handful, have been fiercely and doggedly promoting this criminal breach of our Ghanaian leadership criterion, while farcically pretending to be conservative custodians of our pristine moral and cultural values.

Which is why some ardent critics of our 1992 Fourth-Republican Constitution claim that the country’s current legal or statutory instrument of democratic governance was specially crafted for the country’s longest-reigning half-Scottish junta leader and extortionate military strongman. But what is even more significant to highlight here is the often bitterly complained fact that Ghana’s 1992 Constitution is almost irredeemably hobbled by some “Indemnity Clauses” that are largely and almost exclusively protective of the murderous gun- and grenade-cradling thugs who criminally overthrew the popularly and the democratically elected Hilla “Babini” Limann-led government of the People’s National Party (PNP).

Not surprisingly, Speaker Bagbin conveniently and mischievously ignores this most patently unignorable fact and, instead, cavalierly and pretentiously assumes the patently nonexistent ab initio wholesomeness and integrity of the 1992 Constitution which, by the way, was roundly and massively boycotted by the leaders of the presently ruling neoliberal and market-oriented Danquah-Busia-Dombo-inspired New Patriotic Party, including the now-President Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo and former President John “The Gentle Giant” Agyekum-Kufuor, and such nationally respected legal lights as the 80-something-year-old Mr. Samuel “Sam” Okudjeto, a past President of the Ghana Bar Association.

Thus, contrary to what Speaker Bagbin and the predominantly charlatanic leadership of the National Democratic Congress would have the overwhelming majority of Ghanaians believe, the NDC-crafted 1992 Republican Constitution scandalously lacks the sort of institutionally unarguable respectability of the 1787 Constitution of the United States of America, upon which Ghana’s 1992 Constitution heavily draws, the former’s scores of Amendment-tacked appendices notwithstanding. To be certain, it is the dozens of Amendments tacked onto the 237-year-old United States’ Constitution that make the latter the globally emulative instrument of democratic governance that it has unarguably become.

Unfortunately, in the predictable and the typically pathetic case of Ghana, even the report of the findings of the Constitution Review Commission (CRC) established by the late President John Evans Atta-Mills, a decade ago, have never been seriously debated on the august floor of Parliament, let alone implemented to keep this living instrument of democratic governance, potentially at least, up-to-date and in synch with the epistemically progressive temper of the times, as it were. Which is all the more to be expected, as the entire leadership of the National Democratic Congress keeps demonstrating time and time again that it woefully lacks the requisite skills and vision to move the country conspicuously and remarkably up the national and the global development ladder.

Afforded the mandate to manage the affairs of the longsuffering and well-meaning Ghanaian people, the populist leadership of the National Democratic Congress could only pay back the Sovereign People of Ghana with what has been aptly described a DEATHCARE POLICY, that is, a national healthcare policy called the “Cash-and-Carry” system in which patients unable to pay their healthcare providers are literally left to die on the sword of their own poverty and acute destitution, even as the leadership of the National Democratic Congress, like Speaker Bagbin and Mr. Johnson “The Mosquito” Asiedu-Nketia, the National Chairman of the National Democratic Congress, and Mr. Alexander (Kofi Mensah) Mould, the former Mahama-appointed Executive-Director of the Ghana National Petroleum Corporation (GNPC) and their relatives, political associates and cronies flew abroad for periodic medical checkups and treatment.

Ultimately, the unanimous passage of the Anti-LGBTQ+ Bill by Ghana’s Parliament a couple of weeks ago is a patent act of criminality that makes a complete nonsense of Ghana’s national literacy rate of approximately 82-percent, the highest of its kind in the West-African or ECOWAS Subregion and, to be certain, one of the highest on the African Continent at large. You see, education and a high standard or level of literacy is routinely expected to make the average citizen of Ghana relatively more morally and intellectually enlightened than, for example, a citizen in a neighboring country like Nigeria, where the literacy rate hovers barely upwards of 60-percent.

Now, what the foregoing means is that in practical terms and contrary to the almost invariable global norm or trend, the more literate the proverbial average Ghanaian becomes, the dumber or more obtuse and morally and intellectually unenlightened s/he becomes. It also means that perhaps Ghanaians need a whole new generation of much younger and more progressive and visionary crop of parliamentarians to replace our present Parliament of Clinical Idiots and brazen political opportunists. I bet Prof. Albert Einstein would have been flummoxed by such an apparently steep reversal of standard or normal expectation.

*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 23, 2024
E-mail: [email protected]