Peace Council Is A Nuisance!

By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.

I don't know the historical origins of the so-called Ghana National Peace Council. All I know is that whatever it may self-righteously claim to stand for, the Peace Council was completely AWOL when it was most needed to fight off the rabidly anti-Akan Rawlings revolution. And unless it was put on the national ballot - or referendum - and voted into existence by the Ghanaian electorate, the Most Rev. Emmanuel Asante and his associates have absolutely no business staking out pontifical claims, contrary to the reality, that the Peace Council has any respectable, as well as recognizable, mandate in the court of Ghanaian public opinion.

You see, contrary to what he would have his audience believe, Ghanaians are sophisticated enough to be able to differentiate between what is "relevant" and "significant," and the so-called Peace Council is neither "relevant" nor "significant," regardless of whether this patent nuisance of a political retardant receives "tremendous support" from the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) and/or the European Union (EU) - (See "National Peace Council Vows To Ensure Ghana Remains Peaceful After SC Ruling" MyJoyOnline.com 6/26/13).

What needs to be put on the agenda of our national political discourse is "justice" and the impartial ministration of the rule of law and order, not the mere absence of war amidst grinding poverty and rank corruption in government, which clearly appears to be the self-arrogated mandate of the Peace Council.

Indeed, when the leaders and activists of youth organizations, such as the Young Patriots, are accusing the Peace Council of deliberate tendentiousness in the way in which the PC goes about its duties and issues its public pronouncements, Prof. Asante and his associates had better sit up and pay sedulous attention, unless the PC has some form of formidable military force to back up its decisions and pronouncements.

Really, I don't know precisely what he means when the Methodist Church of Ghana prelate observes, rather annoyingly, that "The fact that everybody is talking about the Peace Council itself tells you that it is relevant... but we do not operate on the basis of people's feelings." Actually, quite a slew of Ghanaian citizens are gabbing about the Peace Council because the PC is increasingly and unsavorily gaining notoriety for its nuisance status, not because any levelheaded Ghanaian citizen sincerely believes that it has anything meaningful and constructive to offer our direly endangered and fledgling democratic political culture.

I also find it to be unforgivably condescending to hear Rev. Asante opine that the PC is "working hard to get political leaders to talk to their followers and encourage them to accept the outcome of the petition in good faith." Is the Methodist prelate here, for instance, implying that Ghanaians who are not as socioeconomically privileged as he and his associates, somehow, lack the requisite cognitive capacity to fully appreciate the meaning of "justice" and "fair play"? You see, I viscerally resent the rather peevish notion that, somehow, the proverbial average Ghanaian has to be conditioned into accepting the patently unacceptable in the reprehensible name of "peace."

To be certain, the Peace Council is the most dangerous instrument of neocolonialism, and ought to be frankly envisaged as such. Needless to say, Ghanaians do not need the vainglorious apparatus of the so-called Peace Council to be able to judge for themselves whether the Atuguba-presided Supreme Court panel hearing the Election 2012 Presidential Petition has delivered evenhanded justice of the highest order and caliber.

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*Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.
Department of English
Nassau Community College of SUNY
Garden City, New York
July 4, 2013
E-mail: [email protected]
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