Martin Amidu Tells It Like It Is

The titles and the headings of his characteristically long and legalistic articles tend to oftentimes obscure and beguile the puissant and the dispassionate thrust of his arguments, even if the premise or premises are ill-shod or wrong-footed sometimes. In the most recent case of what could very well shape up to become a “Constitutional Crisis” - one hopes absolutely not, however - Mr. Martin ABK Amidu, Ghana’s longest-serving Deputy Attorney-General and Deputy Minister of Justice, leaves absolutely no doubt in the mind of any critically thinking reader that when it comes to the subject of his love for the country, the Frafra native from the Upper-East Region has only a handful of peers or rivals.

Martin Amidu is comfortably positioned among the very vanguard of patriotic Ghanaian citizens and legal luminaries. I have also said this before, that, ideological kinks, warts and all - after all, who among us is completely devoid of such patently human foibles? - Martin Amidu is a first-rate scholar. Now, the allusion here is obviously to his very thoughtful and morally sobering article or mini-essay captioned “The Politics Of Desperation For Political Power In Ghana – The Case Of Sitting Members Of Parliament As Independents At The 2024 Elections” (Modernghana.com 10/22/24).

In the main, the first Presidential Running-Mate of the “Palace Assassinated” then-Incumbent President John Evans Atta-Mills, solemnly warns power-drunken fellow National Democratic Congress’ partisans of the sanguinary turn of events, largely rank official corruption and the wanton abuse of power that resulted in both the late Chairman Jeremiah “Jerry” John Rawlings-led juntas of the erstwhile Armed Forces Revolutionary Council (AFRC), on June 4, 1979, and the December 31, 1981, Provisional National Defense Council (PNDC). Mr. Amidu makes absolutely no unsavory ideologically tendentious attempt to justify the preceding bloody and morally horrendous episodes in postcolonial Ghanaian history.

What is deafeningly and inescapably clear in the breach, as it were, is the deliberately unspoken message that if care is not taken this time around, the country could very well be plunged into another apocalyptic nightmare the likes of which has never been witnessed or experienced for at least a century now - the critic tells us that at 70-plus years old presently, he has shot well past the average life expectancy of the overwhelming majority of the Ghanaian citizenry. He does not use precisely the foregoing words, but it is implicitly crystal clear.

Now, another element of power-drunkenness that Mr. Amidu adumbrates is the scandalous and the apparent inability of the National Democratic Congress-sponsored Speaker of Ghana’s Parliament, Mr. Alban Sumana Kingsford Bagbin, a professionally trained lawyer with some 32 years of experience in Ghana’s Fourth Republican Democratic Culture and, to the latter, one may promptly and logically add, Parliamentary Protocol to boot, that ought to enable the Speaker to dispassionately interpret the quite lucid language and the diction of Article 97 (1) (g) and (h) of the country’s 1992 Republican Constitution and, instead, as he has been infamously and/or unpopularly known to have been doing, routinely, for more than three decades, by deviously and dastardly attempting to play fast-and-loose with the dictates of the Supreme Governance Instrument of the Land and, by logical implication and extension, literally ride roughshod over the inalienable civil and the human rights of the overwhelming majority of the Ghanaian citizenry.

On the whole, I found the foregoing lambent-witted observation to be one that the overwhelming majority of Ghanaian voters would be better off to sharply bear in mind as they walk steadily towards their respective polling stations and polling booths to determine which political party’s leadership best qualifies to manage the affairs of our beloved nation for the next four years. It also reminded me, in spite of myself, of a remark that the characteristically rambunctious Supreme Court-defying Mr. Samuel Okudzeto-Ablakwa made not very long ago, when it suddenly dawned on the North-Tongu National Democratic Congress-sponsored Member of Parliament that if care was not taken, vis-a-vis rank official corruption and the wanton indiscipline of our elected politicians and public officials, the possibility and the likelihood of another military intervention was not as farther from the practical realities of our time as some of these young and wet-eared political scumbags and con-artists seemed to imagine.

For Martin Amidu, even more incensing was the at once nefarious and the dastardly attempt by the leadership of the National Democratic Congress to so crudely and recklessly attempt to use the Constitution in a Jiu Jitsu-like coup-d’etat to strategically and deviously reverse bipartisan agreements, decisions and laws passed by both major parties in Parliament, such as the E-Levy and the 2022 Budget which the Bagbin-presided House initially rejected but only to eventually approve. In short, having come to the grim and the politically irredeemable realization of the fact that Candidate John “I Have No Classmates in Ghana” Dramani Mahama has absolutely no enviable performance track record to viably campaign for the Presidency on, the only alternative was to bully their way by corrupting and deliberately and disingenuously misinterpreting the Constitution to achieve their ungodly and inglorious aims and objectives of undeserved power grabbing.

Ghanaian citizens and voters have come too far up the national and the global enlightenment and the national development ladder to be so cheaply and luridly taken for a ride.

*Visit my blog at: KwameOkoampaAhoofeJr

By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., PhD
Professor Emeritus, Department of English
SUNY-Nassau Community College
Garden City, New York
Oct. 22, 2024
E-mail: [email protected]