Is it criminal for Kweku Baako to demand proof or evidence?

They did not make the image and/or reputation of the Editor-Publisher of the New Crusading Guide what either presently is, so I really can’t fathom why these Supreme Court Judges-killing National Democratic Congress’ Abongo Boys suppose that they can, somehow, unmake the hard-earned and enviable image and reputation of legendary Ghanaian journalist and media pundit Mr. Abdul-Malik Kweku Baako (See “Maybe the NDC Can End the Kwaku[sic] Baako Series” 4/11/20).

Ordinarily, I would not be bending myself so low down in order to more comfortably trade blows with these Indemnity-Clause protected political rascals and goons who, in another place and time, would have, each and every one of them, been summarily executed or be serving various long terms of prison sentences.

If they really want to be told the truth, then the fact of the matter is that about the only lasting legacies that Mr. John Dramani Mahama could be creditably acknowledged to have bequeathed Ghanaians are Dumsor – erratic power/electricity supply – and the yet to be explained veritable and incontrovertible and indubitable assassination of then-President John Evans Atta-Mills.

You see, any person who sincerely believes that it was Divine Providence, in His “inscrutable wisdom,” who auspiciously liquidated the former Rawlings’ arch-lieutenant in order to make way for this grossly incompetent presidential second-bananas, must be in dire need of prompt psychiatric examination.

On the debate or controversy swirling around the fact of whether the Bank of Ghana Hospital was conceived and executed by the sitting President at the time when the hospital was built or constructed, Mr. Baako, ever the unimpeachable professional at the game of thoroughly researched and authoritative information dissemination, has set an unimpeachable verification standard which only the agitprop shills of the Mahama-commandeered and cannibalized National Democratic Congress can only hope and attempt to meet, or simply hang their heads in shame over, and their hands tucked in-between their crotches and sheepishly sidle away from. You know, volleying waves of insults at the current Dean of Literate, Investigative and Informed Ghanaian Journalism will not wash. Not in a million years!

Mr. Baako has been handily ahead of the metaphorical pack for nearly two decades now. And, of course, like every fallible human professional, the man is not without his own fair share of flaws and foibles. But, of course, the fairest thing for any of his critics to do right now, is to objectively draw up the balance sheet; and once this is done, I bet, one would readily begin to see that the son of the man who coined the faux-philosophical terminology of “Nkrumaism” stands head-and-shoulders over and above nearly every one of the most significant practitioners of the media trade in present-day Ghana.

Regarding the Bank of Ghana Hospital Legacy Argument, the NDC’s agitprop rascals are deliberately and conveniently shying away from what the real controversy is about, even while also mischievously pretending to be righteously protesting a malicious attempt by Mr. Baako to deny the former President his purportedly well-deserved credit for the conception and establishment of the Bank of Ghana Hospital. In actuality, Mr. Baako is not denying or begrudging the possibility of former President Mahama’s having bequeathed the nation any substantive legacy or legacies, relatively speaking, in the form or shape of the Bank of Ghana Hospital. What the meticulous, systematic and evidence-oriented investigative journalist is asking for is evidentiary proof indisputably indicating that, indeed, it was the former President who conceived of and laid down the procedural steps leading directly to the construction of the Bank of Ghana Hospital.

Is this a criterion or criteria that is too difficult or impossible for the Mahama agitprops to prove or meet? Already, Mr. Baako has provided the public with minutes of ministerial cabinet meetings and conferences to prove that some 9 hospitals that the Mahama Greenbook Authors claim to have been either conceived and/or constructed by National Democratic Congress’ regimes or governments to be patently false; and that, indeed, all the 9 hospitals in contention were either conceived and/or negotiated into existence by operatives of the John Agyekum-Kufuor-led Administration of the New Patriotic Party, that occupied the helm of the nation’s affairs from January 2001 to January 2009. If the foregoing very reasonable demand of show of proof or evidence on the part of the Mahama propagandists is either too difficult or too high to meet, then Mr. Baako’s antagonists had better throw in the towel and humbly and wisely concede defeat.

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

By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., PhD

English Department, SUNY-Nassau

Garden City, New York

E-mail: [email protected]