Candidate For Dictatorship

The picture of a military dictatorship represents the Ghanaian political ambience today.

It is scary the extent to which human rights are being abused, leaving the country in a free-fall towards the lowest rung of the democratic and civility chart.

In a country which ascended to an appreciable notch on the democracy scale before the advent of the incumbent government, we are appalled and dismayed that arbitrary arrests and torture as part of interrogation have almost become a cornerstone of the law enforcement milieu.

Those who have been following local politics since the advent of the National Democratic Congress (NDC) administration in 2025 will attest to the disturbing number of arrests being made by the various state security agencies and still counting.

It is unfathomable why the President will be presiding over this significant abuse of authority characterised by often silly and senseless arrests. These can only be driven by political motives and nothing else.

The arrest on arrival from a trip abroad of the Communications Director of the flagbearer of the New Patriotic Party (NPP), Dennis Miracles Aboagye, smacks of a grand plan by the ruling NDC to spread fear among the opposition NPP, an obsession which cannot in any way inure to the growth of democracy. It is instructive that the reign of terror as being unfolded has not succeeded in cowing the opposition into submission and will not.

The arrest, unconfirmed reports say, are rooted in alleged procurement anomalies. This is a clear case of politically-motivated agenda. Put forth a trumped-up charge and arrest the target under a spectre of drama, the way dictatorships operate.

To think that this is part of a long list of arrests, none of which has matured into a successful prosecution in a court of competent jurisdiction, only feeds into the suspicion that a tendentious project is what the country is witnessing under the present political administration of President John Mahama.

If any pundit had predicted this milieu under a future President John Mahama before the 2024 polls, the source would have been dismissed as a political imbecile.

Unfortunately, here we are, witnessing such crass abuse of power by the President and his henchmen in a manner which has set the clock of democratic progress backwards several years.

To have come this far after painstaking efforts by motley of agencies and individuals in restoring democracy and the rule of law in the aftermath of the post-independence era dictatorship of Kwame Nkrumah under the Convention People's Party (CPP) and the subsequent bloody juntas of Armed Forces Revolutionary Council (AFRC) and Provisional National Defence Council (PNDC), only to witness a resurgence of the bad and traumatic days make our stomachs churn.

The list is long but suffice it to bring to the fore the allegation that a certain Camilla Alhassan was tortured by state security agents while being held is one which demands an independent enquiry.

Failure to do this would make us, as a country, a potential candidate for a dictatorship – poles apart from the rule of law.

Let us earn our deserved place among the comity of the civilised by steering away from this government-sanctioned rule of brutality and incivility where suspects are tortured while in detention.

Those who think that they are exempt from the bloody claws of this brutish regime must rethink their stance, because tomorrow it could be them.

This gradual fading reality of the rule of law and decency call for a united voice from the people of this country; from faith entities to all facets of society, silence cannot be an option.

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