Kennedy Agyapong Violated the Civil Rights of Hussein-Suale

I unreservedly agree with Mr. Adam Bonah, the security analyst, that the Assin-Central New Patriotic Party’s Member of Parliament, Mr. Kennedy Ohene Agyapong, may very well be further complicating matters for himself by presuming to place a GHȻ 100K bounty on the heads of the allegedly two unidentified killers of undercover private investigator, Mr. Ahmed Hussein-Suale, whose January 16, 2019 brutal slaying may very well have been either intentionally or unintentionally provoked by an earlier “oblique bounty” that the media mogul had placed against the safety of the slain man (See “Ahmed Killing: Keep Your GHȻ 100K Bounty, You’re Suspect – Ken Agyapong Told” Kasapafmonline.com / Ghanaweb.com 1/29/19).

On the other hand, I think that any right to flatly and publicly refuse or reject the bounty offer made by the NET 2 TV station owner ought to come from the bona fide members of Mr. Hussein-Suale’s family, who may, of course, be desperately seeking the identification and arrest of the unidentified killers, and not Mr. Bonah who could, himself, be considered a criminal suspect like any member of the general public as well. Indeed, I have warned Mr. Agyapong in the past that his Big Mouth was apt to seal his doom in the offing, if he did not take heed. In this case, even if the murder suspects came out to confess today, the Oman-FM radio station owner could still be held liable for flagrantly violating the human and civil rights of Mr. Hussein-Suale.

Mr. Agyapong, who has lived right here in the United States for quite a considerable length of time, and is also known to have had several of his own children given birth to here in America, knows perfectly well that if he had made the sort of negative utterances that he is alleged to have made against the person of Mr. Hussein-Suale, as well as calling for the latter’s brutal mauling or beating by any willing members of the general public, as well as the widespread display of the photographs of the slain man as his prime target of abuse, his case would already have been pending before the courts even long before the unidentified killers of Mr. Hussein-Suale voluntarily surfaced in public or got arrested by our law-enforcement agents.

And so, the question of why he persists in acting and behaving in ways that would have gotten him severely punished here in the United States, in Ghana, boggles my mind. He may be loaded with moola, as my own two boys would say, or be filthy rich, but this does not give the Assin-Central legislator the right to casually presume to endanger the lives of others whose professional line of work he either vehemently disagrees with or finds to be insufferably offensive. Even if the murder suspects were to be ferreted out of the proverbial woodwork today and were to confess to the same, the fact still remains that Mr. Agyapong may very well have played a very significant role in fanning the flames of public hatred and character assassination that possibly encouraged these murder contractors to snuff the living daylights out of Mr. Hussein-Suale.

Indeed, even as Mr. Bonah, the security analyst, remarked recently, there is absolutely no difference between Mr. Agyapong’s earlier offer to paying anybody who could physically maim the body and person of Mr. Hussein-Suale, and offering to pay anybody with a tip or clues that may reliably lead to the arrest and prosecution of the allegedly unidentified criminal suspects linked to the brutal slaying of the former Tiger-Eye PI investigative journalist. It simply reeks of the inescapably contradictory, and the Assin-Central MP would be better off keeping his bounty and allowing our law-enforcement agencies to meticulously do their work. Even if the murder suspects are apprehended and rigorously prosecuted today, it would still not bring back the life of Mr. Hussein-Suale who, we learn, left behind a couple of wives and several infants and toddlers.

At this stage, the best that Mr. Agyapong could do would be to beg for forgiveness from both the spirit of the savagely slain man and his family members, friends, colleagues and relatives; and, indeed, from Ghanaians at large, both at home and abroad. I have already observed the fact that this tragic event is likely to mark the most difficult phase in the life of the Assin-Central MP, and Mr. Agyapong may very likely never completely recover from the trauma that his reckless rhetoric and behavior have wreaked for the family of the slain man, the country and the civilized democratic world at large. Mr. Agyapong, who presently appears to be in abject denial about his very significant role in the murder of Mr. Hussein-Suale, also did not make matters any better for himself, when he initially insisted, in the wake of the brutal slaying of his hitherto archnemesis, that he had done absolutely nothing regrettable vis-à-vis the chain of events, of which he was clearly the instigator, that may very well have either directly or indirectly led to the murder of Mr. Hussein-Suale. Are any “Shiites” in our audience?

*Visit my blog at: kwameokoampaahoofe.wordpress.com Ghanaffairs

By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., PhD
English Department, SUNY-Nassau
Garden City, New York
January 29, 2019
E-mail: [email protected]