What Is Good for the Mosquito Is Also Good for the Simulium Fly

The operatives of the main opposition National Democratic Congress (NDC) may very well have put themselves between the metaphorical rock and a hard place, in the matter of the alleged hostilities that occurred between the country’s two major parties in the Ayawaso-West Wuogon Constituency byelection on Thursday, January 31, 2019. On the one hand, as more than amply demonstrated by former President John Dramani Mahama, the key operatives of the NDC have absolutely no use for our taxpayer-founded and funded Ghana Police Service and would rather prefer to use the Anas Aremeyaw Anas-owned Tiger Eye PI team/firm of undercover private investigators.

At the same time, when a commission of inquiry like the recently established Short Commission was charged with probing NDC leadership’s complaints of having been brutally assaulted by specially recruited New Patriotic Party-sponsored vigilantes, the knee-jerk reaction has been for the Indemnity Clause-protected NDC leaders, especially narcissistic gadflies like Mr. Johnson Asiedu-Nketia, the party’s longtime General-Secretary, to publicly and bitterly complain that this government-established Commission is being strategically and mischievously used to circumvent the administration of justice, and that personnel of the Criminal Investigations Department (CID) of the GPS could, somehow, do a better job to promptly bring the criminal culprits and suspects to book (See “Police Are at Liberty to Investigate Byelection Violence – Secretary to Commission of Inquiry” Modernghana.com 2/9/19).

This adamant determination to have the criminal suspects in the Ayawaso-West Wuogon election-related violence investigated and prosecuted by personnel of the Ghana Police Service, sharply contrasts with the equally violent occurrences at Talensi and Atiwa, among scores of other byelections across the country, in which operatives of the National Democratic Congress constituted a majority of the prime suspects but absolutely no such appeal for police investigations and prosecutions or the establishment of commissions of inquiry was either called for or demanded by either the aggrieved or the government of the day, to wit, the Mills-Mahama-led and Mahama/Amissah-Arthur-led governments of the National Democratic Congress.

In all those previous instances, the man who is now vehemently decrying the Ayawaso-West Wuogon incidents of violence, at least as is being alleged by the leaders of the main opposition National Democratic Congress, never found it appropriate or worthwhile to set up commissions of inquiry in the past to ensure that such repulsive acts of barbarism did not recur in the offing or the near future. Which is precisely why we are back to where a quixotically megalomaniacal President John Dramani Mahama plunged the country at Talensi and Atiwa in 2015 or thereabouts. On the latter score, I perfectly agree with Dr. Ernest Kofi Abotsi, the Short Commission’s Secretary and former Dean of Law at GIMPA, that is, the Ghana Institute of Management and Public Administration, that what is most significant here, vis-à-vis the Short Commission’s terms of reference, is the critical examination of the sort of institutional and structural defects in our national security apparatus that have enabled a carcinogenic situation in which we, as a nation, continue to unwisely lurch from one bout of byelection violence to another, almost as if we woefully lack competent leadership and critical-thinking skills to effectively and progressively move the nation towards prosperity and success.

While, of course, it cannot be gainsaid that those found to have run afoul of the law would have to be promptly and rigorously punished to healthily serve as a deterrent, nevertheless, the objective focus here ought to be the emplacement of preventive institutional structures rather than an ad-hoc or a knee-jerk or vengeful and punitive approach to a problem that may be far more systemic than cultural or behavioral. Personally, however, I don’t suppose or think that the government ought to accommodate the patently illogical and flagrant – to speak much less about the downright criminal – attempt by the leaders of the National Democratic Congress to put themselves way over and above the sacred laws of the land. For when all has been said and done, it still stands to reason that what is good for Mr. Asiedu-Nketia, the infamous Bui Dam Woyome, is equally good for any of the alleged criminal suspects of the Ayawaso-West Wuogon violent hostilities.

Naturally, the man popularly nicknamed General Mosquito would hear nothing about the “equalization” political culture and precedent that was officially canonized by the Mills-Mahama Posse. But, of course, it goes without saying that “equalization” is inescapably synonymous with the strict administration of justice or the naturalistic settling of scores, as it were. True “revolutionaries” are equalizers, not meek-mannered Christocentric, cheek-turning pacifists. But, of course, we all know that the Indemnity Clause-protected throat-cutting operatives of the National Democratic Congress are wimps and thoroughgoing cowards and absolutely no “Boot-for-Boot” revolutionaries at all, contrary to what the Bole-Bamboi petty chieftain, Mr. John “Dubai” Dramani Mahama, would have the rest of us, that is, the nation, believe.

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By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., PhD
English Department, SUNY-Nassau
Garden City, New York
February 9, 2019
E-mail: [email protected]