Politically Primitive and Savage NDC Cannot Eat Its “Ofam” and Have It as Well

Mr. George Opare-Addo – aka Pablo – says that there are too many exemptions to the recently ratified Right-To-Information (RTI) Law that have ensured that this otherwise progressive, foresighted and unprecedented legal instrument would be either stillborn or practically irrelevant to the purpose for which this law was conceived, designed, crafted and implemented (See “Akufo-Addo Has Diluted RTI Law – NDC” 5/23/19). The National Democratic Congress’ National Organizer does not specify what exemptions to the RTI Law renders the latter effectively and practically irrelevant, so it is difficult to take the critic any more seriously than to simply observe that Mr. Opare-Addo made the patently cynical remark attributed to him because he just wanted to hear his own voice reechoed by the media.

Now, what is relevant to pointedly observe here is the glaring and scandalous failure by the NDC’s youth leader to humbly and soberly admit to himself and to the savvy Ghanaian public, at large, that the Jerry John Rawlings-founded and led National Democratic Congress (NDC) had the prime and golden opportunity to literally step up to the plate, in American baseball parlance, to enact the RTI law more than twenty years ago, but abjectly and tyrannically and flatly refused to do so, until a far more democratically progressive and liberally oriented President Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo decided to do so recently. We must also quickly and emphatically point out to Mr. Opare-Addo and his ilk of blissfully historically ignorant political upstarts that but for Nana Akufo-Addo’s equally visionary crafting and implementation of the landmark Repeal of the Criminal Libel Law, under the equally progressive watch of President John Agyekum-Kufuor, Ghanaians would still be marking time in Stone Age political culture. By the way, why is Mr. Opare-Addo not talking about the Indemnity Clause-hobbled Fourth-Republican Constitution of Ghana?

The NDC’s National Organizer could also have rested assured of being picked up by personnel of the Tsikata-reconfigured Bureau of National Investigations (BNI) for questioning and detention for a considerable while, for so cavalierly presuming to make a mockery of the most progressive and enlightened Administration in Ghana’s Fourth Republic. These shameless NDC operatives also need to be reminded of the fact that if, indeed, the country seems to have been unprecedently gripped by a fit of lawlessness, it is primarily because of the active presence of pathological NDC scofflaws like Messrs. John Dramani Mahama, the 2020 Presidential Candidate of the National Democratic Congress; Samuel Okudzeto-Ablakwa; Samuel Ofosu-Ampofo, the NDC’s National Chairman and indicted murderous co-conspirator in seditious activities; and Edward Omane-Boamah, the former Mahama Communication Minister, on our national political landscape.

It is also inexcusably absurd for the NDC’s National Organizer, or anybody else, for that matter, to suggest that Tiger-Eye investigative journalist Ahmed Suale was brutally slain because the latter had dared to boldly and righteously expose “deep-seated corruption in our football fraternity.” Indeed, in all likelihood, it was deliberately contracted elements of the Mahama- and Ofosu-Ampofo-led National Democratic Congress that orchestrated the swift and summary liquidation of Mr. Suale, as I recently had occasion to observe in a critical comparative analysis of the Suale slaying with a strikingly similar gangster-style brutal assassination that occurred inside the compound of the Asante Regional Headquarters of the National Democratic Congress, while party bigwigs like Messrs. Johnson Asiedu-Nketia, the NDC’s longest-reigning General-Secretary, Ofosu-Ampofo and Julius Debrah, among a platoon of others, were comfortably holed up inside the party’s edifice.

We must also significantly underscore the fact that under former President Mahama’s watch, far more prominent Ghanaian citizens were executed, Mafia-fashion, by what clearly appeared to state-sponsored contractors, including the savage bedroom stabbing-death of Mr. Joseph Boakye Danquah-Adu, the Akufo-Addo cousin and extant New Patriotic Party’s Member of Parliament for the Akyem-Abuakwa-North Constituency; and even more damning, the brutal point-blank assassination of the Mahama-appointed District Chief Executive (DCE), Mr. Peter Kenyenso, of Nkwanta-South, presently located in the recently created Oti Region. Make absolutely no mistake: if any activist group or groups of bona fide Ghanaian citizens ever fiercely fought to guarantee press freedom and individual free-speech in the country, that group or those groups were far more closely allied with the ideological suasion and camp of the now-President Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo than with the suasion or ideological camp of any other Ghanaian leader.

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

By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., PhD
English Department, SUNY-Nassau
Garden City, New York
May 23, 2019
E-mail: [email protected]