Parliament should not insult our intelligence!

I read the epistolary press statement presumably written and signed by the Acting-Director of Public Affairs of Ghana’s Parliament, Ms. Kate Addo, with annoyance, especially vis-à-vis her rather inadvisable attempt to fault the Ghanaian citizenry at large for the grossly intemperate and patently inexcusable behavior of the so-called Commander-in-Chief of the Economic Fighters League (EFL), Mr. Ernesto Yeboah, and one Mr. Abeku Adam, described as an accomplice, in the Visitors’ Gallery of the Main Chamber of Parliament (See “Don’t Disrespect Our Rules – Parliament to Ghanaians” Modernghana.com 7/5/19).

It goes without saying that Ernesto Yeboah is a virtual household name when it comes to all that is wrong with Fourth Republican Ghanaian Political Culture. He is also a veritable political copycat with very marginal talent. For instance, the very name of his organization, Economic Fighters League, is clearly an unintended caricature of Mr. Julius Malema’s far more serious and formidable South African political party by the name of Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF), that may very well constitute a government in the Pretoria of the foreseeable future.

In other words, my argument here is that before Ernesto Yeboah was allowed to enter the Visitors’ Gallery of the Main Chamber of Parliament, the rump-Convention People’s Party (r-CPP) renegade was very well known to the security personnel of the august House. His volatile and primitive temperament and virulent fire-spitting rhetoric were equally well known to the security operatives of Parliament House, as well as to the overwhelming majority of our parliamentary representatives.

So, the audience that Ms. Addo, the Acting-Director of Parliament, ought to have been addressing should have been the security guards who apparently inadvisably permitted Mr. Yeboah admission to the Visitors’ Gallery of the House, and not the general Ghanaian citizenry or public who, by the way, are neither “strangers” nor do they have absolutely anything to do with the insufferably undisciplined or flagrantly disruptive behavior of the subject of this brief column and his associate.

Put in simple English, the abjectly cavalier disrespect for the Ghanaian citizenry and the electorate, that is, the very people who pay both the salaries and perks of our Members of Parliament and the Acting-Director of Public Affairs of Parliament, displayed in the press statement written and published by the latter, ought not to be tolerated under any circumstances whatsoever. You see, Ghanaian democracy is what it is presently not because of our stiff-necked MPs, for the most part, but indisputably because of the courageous and yeomanly struggles of ordinary Ghanaian citizens. I hope these evidently brassy, pompous, greedy and self-serving Ghanaian parliamentarians fully appreciate this stark fact of our beloved country’s social and political history.

*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]