Asiedu Nketia Just Didn’t Make Sense

I was smitten with bewilderment as I mused over Asiedu Nketia’s warped and fatuous claim. It is not exactly clear why he and his party yeasayers would delude themselves into thinking that the violent image that the ordinary Ghanaian unmistakably associates the NDC with is now dead as a doornail (See, NDC @24:’We’ve shed our “violent image”-Nketia, starfmonline.com june 10, 2016).

It took me quite some time to get a grip on myself and to steadily lose my smouldering emotions on my computer. To be certain, Asiedu Nketia is under no stricture vis-à-vis what to say to animate NDC aficionados. But a sternly critical assertion like this, flagitiously assaults the sensibility of the Ghanaian who witnessed the horrifying and deadeye twenty something years of political domination by the P/NDC.

Ghana was thrown into a state of shock when in July 1982, three high court judges in Accra, namely Justice Kojo Adjei Agyapong, Justice Fred Poku Sarkodie and Mrs Cecelia Koranteng Addo were abducted, driven 50 miles away into the Afram plains and executed in cold blood. Not only were they executed, their bodies were doused in petrol and set on fire. After months of sitting by a special investigation board,10 persons were recommended for arrest and prosecution including Nana Konadu Agyeman Rawlings.

She was cited to have kept the key to a white fiat campagnola jeep,allegedly used by the murderers.As a matter of fact, the murdered judges were sitting on review cases that had to do with victims of the Armed Forces Revolutionary Council atrocities headed by Flt.Lt. Jerry John Rawlings.

Subsequently,it was alleged that the ghastly murder of the judges was ordered by Flt. Lt. Jerry John Rawlings with the aim of punishing members of the bench who were perceived as reversing the gains of June 4 and to summarily proscribe the legitimate judicial governance of property acquisition.

It perhaps doesn’t come worse than a sitting President, beating up his vice .Does it? On December 28,1995, during a cabinet meeting, chaired by the then Vice President Nkensen Ackaar, President Jerry John Rawlings whose hackles had risen over comments made by the former at the party congress the previous week, challenged him to go out and prove to the world, the corrupt things that took place during cabinet meetings.

The late Ackaar had attended the NDC congress and detailed salient instances of corruption scandals in which the NDC Cabinet then had been mired. According to Ackaar,Rawlings gave him a terrible blow on the shoulder which sent him falling to the floor.

A few minutes later the president then took his arm, insisting that he should leave. Ackaah reacted by attempting to shrug off the hand holding him.Jerry John Rawlings tore the shoulder of his jacket in the process. In his frustration, he kicked Ackaar a couple of times in the groin before members present were able to restrain him.

And so precisely what was Asiedu Nketia yelping about when he jadedly got into his usual spin overdrive? One cannot help but look on with no small measure of amusement when proponents of the maleficent era of the P/NDC luridly try hanging the “violent” tag around the neck of the New Patriotic Party. Indeed it is for this reason that, the NDC disingenuously misrepresent the “all die be die” clarion call by Akuffu Addo as a way of labelling the latter as a violent person.

And on the preceding score, the NPP has stressed that the “all die be die” mantra by its flagbearer was a wake up call to its members who had suffered severe brutalities and intimidation from members of the rulling NDC to defend themselves. Again,members of the rulling NDC are quick to tar the NPP with the same brush as being violent by citing the “Afoko-Kwabena Agyapong” vicissitude of dustups that bedevilled the NPP some months ago, and resulted into the gruesome murder of Adams Mahama,the then Upper-East regional chairman of the NPP.

It goes without saying that the upward spiral of Akuffu Addo into political prominence and statesmanship following his unguarded acceptance of the supreme court petition verdict even though he disagreed and could have appealed or incited his incontinent supporters to resort to violence, gives the NDC the heebie-jeebies, hence they would want to cramp his style and make him look violent in the eyes of the Ghanaian people.

While I unreservedly agree that violence permeates every sector of the society including political parties in Ghana, it can hardly be gainsaid that the NDC was born out of violence. Given that it was the bloody junta of the AFRC- PNDC, that metamorphosed into NDC.

The poignant memory of the brutalities of the AFRC-P/NDC is so dense that it would probably require the ocean to wash it off completey from the memory of the Ghanaian.Perhaps as knavish as Asiedu Nketia and his NDC are, they are probably inspired by Vladimir Lenin’s quote that says,”A lie, told often enough becomes the truth”.

They have a penchant for deep political machinations. They reckon that the average Joe doesn’t have the mental capacity to subject such claims of worthless validity to critical thinking and ratiocination. To this end, members of the NDC would give their eye teeth to shoehorn the political space with hogwash and subterfuge.

Out of the 66 years of Ghana’s independence, the P/NDC has governed for over 25 years. More than any other political regime in Ghana. Asiedu Nketia should have used the occasion of their 24th anniversary to tell us what his party’s government is doing about the topsy-turvy state of the economy and the unbridled corruption that has plagued upper echelons of this government unconscionably. Otherwise, no political party worth its sort would barefacedly throw down the gauntlet on such an occasion only to be hauled over the coals.