NPP Youth Secretary should not apologize

The Chief of Wungu, or Wungu-Naaba, has absolutely no business interfering in the political fisticuffs reportedly raging between local players of the country’s two major political parties, namely, the ruling National Democratic Congress (NDC) and the main opposition New Patriotic Party (NPP).

The alleged controversy flared up when the Walewale District Health Director, Dr. Abdulai Abubakari, was transferred from the district to the more relatively remote Tatale District because Dr. Abubakari was accused of having made a politically partisan statement while receiving an ambulance donated to the Walewale Government Hospital by the incumbent Member of Parliament for the district, who also happens to be a stalwart of the New Patriotic Party (See “NPP Executive Summoned Over Facebook Comment” Ultimatefmonline.com / Ghanaweb.com 10/24/16).

We are not told the precise nature of the “politically partisan statement” made by the Walewale District Health Director that occasioned the immediate transfer of Dr. Abubakari who, we are further told, has been replaced by an ethnic clansman of President John Dramani Mahama’s by the name of Mr. Emmanuel Ewuntomah who, until his present appointment, was a disease control officer at Bole, a town in the Gonja district of the Northern Region.

We are also told that the Wungu-Naaba has summoned some five political activists and party operatives, including the New Patriotic Party’s Youth Secretary for the Walewale Constituency because Mr. Shamsudeen Iddrisu had dared to accuse the National Democratic Congress’ parliamentary candidate for Walewale, Mr. Abubakari Abdallah, who also happens to be the Northern Regional Minister, of being smack behind the punitive transfer of Dr. Abdulai Abubakari.

That Mr. Iddrisu’s protest against the punitive transfer of Dr. Abubakari on Facebook was what triggered the intervention of the Wungu-Naaba, makes the entire affair all the more bizarre. It is bizarre because while, indeed, he may be the legitimately invested traditional ruler or overlord of Walewale, nonetheless, the Wungu-Naaba has absolutely no business, whatsoever, in determining whether the Facebook protest registered by the NPP Youth Secretary was truthful or untruthful in thrust and content.

Not even if the Wungu-Naaba were the Walewale Constituency Chairman of the National Democratic Congress, or even the Walewale District Chief Executive.
But even more significant, the Wungu-Naaba is not a Judicial Council-certified jurist of any legitimately constituted court of the land to cavalierly presume to summon any resident of his locality to his court, short of that subject of summons’ having been determined to be in flagrant breach of the public peace. But even in such an instance, the onus of judgment and discipline fully and squarely rests with local law-enforcement authorities and not the Wungu-Naaba or Chief of Walewale.

Besides, merely summoning NPP operatives like Mr. Shamsudeen Iddrisu to clearly intimidate them into silent submission does not invalidate the critical question of whether, indeed, Dr. Abubakari was transferred from Walewale to Tatale primarily because the latter had allegedly made a politically loaded partisan statement while taking receipt of an ambulance donated by Dr. Sagre Bambangi, an agricultural economist and parliamentary incumbent of the Walewale Constituency.

As it presently stands, the Wungu-Naaba has clearly indicated his ideological stance as an NDC partisan and thus cannot be expected to play a neutral or dispassionate arbitrator in the dispute at issue.

Neither does the Wungu-Naaba have any legal right or authority to regulate what anybody posts on Facebook, a global discursive forum, be that person a citizen of Walewale or Wamfie. If Mr. Abubakaru Abdallah, the Northern Regional Minister who also doubles as the NDC parliamentary candidate for Walewale in the 2016 general election, firmly believes that he has a good case against any of his main political rivals and/or opponents, let him grieve his case with any of our legitimately constituted courts of law and stop playing infantile games with any of our constitutionally mandated non-partisan traditional rulers.

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