Truth Is Often Insensitive

This is a classic case of the chickens coming home to roost. My profound apologies to the legendary and immortalized African-American Civil Rights Leader El-Hajj Malik Al-Shabazz, popularly known as Malcolm X. The reference here, though, is to the grossly irresponsible leadership whose criminal acts of deliberate omission and commission precipitated the tragic early Monday-morning murder of Capt. Maxwell Adam Mahama, of the Accra-based 5^th Battalion of Infantry of the Ghana Armed Forces, at Denkyira-Obuasi, in the Central Region.

Most of the blame must be squarely placed at the doorstep of the operatives of the National Democratic Congress (NDC), under whose tenure the negative influx of illegal Chinese and other foreign small-time miners became an ungovernable reality in the country. Indeed, a substantial portion of the blame must also be placed at the feet of former President John Dramani Mahama, the immediate predecessor of President Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo, and the man who may very well have established the dangerous regime of involving our patriotic men and women in uniform in the inexcusably self-destructive and immitigably ungodly act of providing armed protection to illegal Chinese miners or Galamseyers.

While I perfectly understand the utter displeasure and even moral outrage created by the matter-of-fact comments by Mr. Daniel Appianing, the Denkyira-Obuasi (or Boase) District Chief Executive, nevertheless, it is pointedly and logically out of place for the family members, relatives and friends of the late Capt. Maxwell Adam Mahama to be calling for the radical sanctioning or possible dismissal of Mr. Appianing, whose sole offense appears to have been the fact of the DCE’s boldly and courageously exposing the already widely known involvement of our soldiers in the collaborative destruction of the very basis of our survival, our lands and water bodies, with Chinese and other illegal foreign operatives in the Galamsey industry (See “Government Will Look into DCE’s Comments Over Capt. Mahama’s Lynching – Bawumia” MyJoyOnline.com 5/31/17).

As I pointed out in a previous article, the slain nephew of former President Mahama may very well have been among the relatively small percentage of soldiers recently called upon by President Akufo-Addo to help stop the wanton destruction of our environment by Galamseyers, the painful fact still remains indisputable, at least as credibly attested by Mr. John Peter Amewu, the Lands and Natural Resources Minister, and the Denkyira-Obuasi District Chief Executive that, hitherto, the overwhelming majority of soldiers in the field are Galamsey protectors, and not progressive facilitators of the salutary cessation of this patent act of criminality of the highest order.

This observation is not, in any way, geared towards blaming the victim, but it is quite obvious that it was the highly charged climate of violence in the country, the inescapable result of abjectly poor leadership, that may very well have prompted Capt. Mahama to carry a pistol on him while jogging all by himself across-town with the apparently false sense of confidence, self-assurance and safety. We are told, for instance, that Capt. Mahama had attempted to exercise his handy firepower, the very symbol of hostility that had fatefully led his assailants into mistakenly identifying him as one of the legion armed bandits who have been preying on community residents in recent months.

On the latter score, the cultivated notoriety of the soldiers in the neighborhood must bear the brunt of the blame. Which also clearly explains why the victim’s appeal to his would-be slayers, that he was an army officer, had been promptly rejected. What this also means is that the personnel of the Ghana Armed Forces, in particular the top-echelon leadership of the GAF, need to initiate an elaborate institutional process of regaining the lost trust, respect and confidence of the country’s civilian population. Needless to say, an army that is not trusted and respected by the very citizenry it claims to be protecting has absolutely no good reason for its existence. This is precisely where matters stand presently.

As for the matter-of-fact presentation of the widespread negative perception of our soldiers by the overwhelming majority of the residents of Denkyira-Obuasi by Mr. Appianing, it is strikingly akin to then-Vice President Mahama’s cheerfully announcing to the country that Divine Providence, in His inscrutable wisdom, had deemed it fit, proper and opportune to shove his immediate boss, to wit, President John Evans Atta-Mills, out of the way to make way for the auspicious emergence of the first post-independence-born President of Ghana. I did not hear anybody, including the protesting Mahama family members, call for the resignation or removal of the man who, many believe, may very well have had a hand in the demise of his immediate predecessor.

We may not like it, but the fact of the matter is that we cannot invalidate or summarily proscribe the perception of those who have had to live the nightmarish experience of seeing our soldiers staunchly protect foreign Galamseyers at the expense of the systematically harried Ghanaian taxpayer. We can only hope that the overwhelming majority of our soldiers, in the offing, become primarily responsive and responsible for the protection of the citizens whose interests, aspirations and destiny they have been pledged to serve.

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By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.
English Department, SUNY-Nassau
Garden City, New York
May 31, 2017
E-mail: [email protected]