Does Totobi Quakyi Believe in the Rule of Law and Judicial Integrity?

I don’t know that Mr. Kofi Totobi Quakyi, the longtime “Squealer” of Chairman Rawlings’ Animal Farm, has any moral authority and/or integrity to cavalierly presume to lecture President Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo on the imperative need to preserving the current democratic dispensation of Ghana’s Fourth Republic, if only because Mr. Quakyi was a key player in the chaotic fomentation and systematic propagation of the unspeakable faux-socialist reign-of-terror, crudely labeled as a “Housecleaning” exercise that was the Rawlings-led bloody junta of the erstwhile Provisional National Defense Council (PNDC). If in the eyes of the longtime Rawlings’ Information Minister, our national security apparatus has so dangerously vitiated as to have brought Ghana to the brink of chaos and civil strife, then, of course, it goes without saying that Mr. Quakyi and his “revolutionary” cronies and associates of the erstwhile Provisional National Defense Council have themselves to blame (See “Kofi Totobi Quakyi [sic] Open Letter to the President on Recent Events at Ayawaso West Wuogon Constituency” Modernghana.com 2/5/19).

He has his PNDC cronies and himself to blame because Mr. Totobi Quakyi was a staunch supporter and a key player of the Rawlings-Tsikata Tribal Diarchy that wantonly and unconscionably orchestrated the cowardly and dastardly ethnic-cleansing Mafia-style assassination of the Three Akan-Descended Accra High Court Judges and the Retired Ghana Army Major on that eerily dark night of Wednesday, June 30, 1982 (See the Azu-Crabbe-chaired Report of the Special Investigations Board or the SIB Report). I am amazed at the fact that Mr. Quakyi has the temerity to so self-righteously presume to plead for the right of his own children and the children of his “revolutionary” associates and cronies to be afforded the patently undeserved opportunity to live and prosper in a peaceful climate in Ghana, knowing very well that the High Court Judges and the Retired Ghana Army Major whom the Rawlings junta abducted in the thick of darkness and summarily and savagely executed also had children of their own, who were no less deserving of their inalienable and inviolable human rights and, in particular, the sacred right to their parents and primary breadwinners.

You see, we all know that one of the three slain judges was a nursing mother with a three-month-old baby daughter at the time. Now, has it ever occurred to the man who spent much of his career pontifically facilitating Chairman Rawlings’ ruthless suppression of media and personal freedoms – and here, of course, I am also thinking about Mr. Quakyi’s court battle with Dr. Charles Wereko-Brobby (aka Tarzan”) over the latter’s Radio Eye broadcast station – that the brutally slain judges also had human rights, including the right to provide for their children and grandchildren? You see, the narcissistic hypocrisy of Mr. Totobi Quakyi greatly amazes me, especially in that part of his so-called Open Letter to President Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo where the former Rawlings’ Security Minister makes the following observation on the recent largely NDC-provoked violence during the Ayawaso-West Wuogon Constituency byelection: “Thursday. They [sic] were ominous portents of the coming election in 2020, and of the inevitability of bloodshed if we persist in this course.”

I have yet to read the same barely veiled threat of civil strife from Mr. Totobi Quakyi about any prior written dark prognosis or “ominous portents” in the wake of the NDC- and the Azorka Boys’-orchestrated election-related violence in the leadup to the 2016 general election on Akwatia, Atiwa, Agbogbloshie and Talensi. You see, what implacably annoys this writer, here, is Mr. Totobi Quakyi’s implicit suggestion that, somehow, it is perfectly in keeping with Ghana’s 1992 Republican Constitution and democratic principles for operatives of the National Democratic Congress to freely cause election-related mayhem and other wanton acts of political brutalities because, somehow, “The unsettled scores of yesterday’s men must not condemn the hopes of tomorrow’s [children?] and of their [succeeding?] generations.” In other words, what Mr. Totobi Quakyi unmistakably appears to be saying here is that Indemnity Clause-protected Ghanaian citizens like himself are eternally excepted from the civilized rule of law and the impartial administration of justice. No such pontifical thesis could be more preposterous.

It is also crystal clear that the only “gaslighters” of the Ayawaso-West Wuogon election-related violence are self-delusional NDC party apparatchiks like Messrs. Totobi Quakyi, Edward Omane-Boamah and Johnson Asiedu-Nketia, among a plethora of other NDC bigwigs. The fact of the matter is that the terror-trucking NDC thugs were outsmarted and outmatched at Ayawaso-West Wuogon because our savvy national security agents had long anticipated their well-known shenanigans and expertly prepared to decisively and thoroughly quash the same. Which is why seasoned political charlatans and devious political propagandists like Mr. Totobi Quakyi seem to be so delightfully stunned, traumatized and psychologically addled like a college of deer in vehicular headlights. Needless to say, what will not wash is this facile attempt to cheaply scapegoat and fault Mr. Bryan Acheampong, the admittedly inexperienced but, nevertheless, quite savvy Minister of State in-charge of National Security, for having so fiercely and heroically trounced the NDC’s infamous goon squad.

I also don’t know that an irredeemably scandalous cutthroat politician like Mr. Totobi Quakyi is capable of feeling scandalized by the “comedies” of the recent Ayawaso-West Wuogon equivalent of Mr. Anas Aremeyaw Anas’ “Number 12” documentary exposé. If, indeed, “it has been [his] custom in recent times to abstain from the brouhaha of our public discourse,” this may be primarily because an apparently “born-again” Mr. Totobi Quakyi is absolutely bereft of any iota of credibility and moral authority, and not merely because he “truly relishes the solitude of private life.”

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

By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., PhD
English Department, SUNY-Nassau
Garden City, New York
February 14, 2019
E-mail: [email protected]