Opinions of Saturday, 11 August 2007
Columnist: Okoampa-Ahoofe, Kwame
Return Ghana to Ghanaians Once More
Until the advent of the so-called Armed Forces Revolutionary Council (AFRC) on the Ghanaian political landscape on June 4, 1979, Ghana was largely a staid and peaceful country, with the level of non-military-oriented gun violence statistically insignificant. And while the AFRC was not the first military junta to occupy the Ghanaian political landscape, it was, indeed, the first government of its kind to prioritize gun violence and mass murder (remember the rallying cry: “Let the Blood Flow!”) – in the dubious name of revolutionary probity and accountability – as an acceptable means of settling scores. It would shortly morph into the so-called Provisional National Defense Council (PNDC), a gross misnomer, after the violent and unconstitutional overthrow of the People’s National Party (PNP), led by Dr. Hilla Limann, and normalize the flagrant use of violence by the establishment of a pseudo-socialist system of governance run by armed thugs nicknamed “Commandos.”
The commandos, in essence, were the armed and outright terrorist equivalent of the Young Pioneer Movement (YPM). And they were, unquestionably, the secret behind the political longevity of Mr. Rawlings and his so-called Provisional National Democratic Congress (P/NDC).
In the Kufuor era, the much-remarked under- and counter-culture of violence has its origins in Mr. Rawlings’ establishment of the Commando Units. And with the condignly democratic loss of power by the P/NDC, these well-armed and military-trained thugs simply went underground; they were not disarmed, the way that their counterparts in Sierra Leone, Liberia and elsewhere on the African continent have been. Rather, they have remained in hiding and poised to doing the destructive bidding of their supreme-capo, Flt.-Lt. Jeremiah John (SCANCEM?) Rawlings. And this is why we have noted that when Professor John Evans Atta-Mills talks about the prevalence of “Contract Killings” in the country, the Rawlings second-bananas knows pretty well exactly what he is talking about.
It also appears to us that any national discourse – or conversation – on gun-violence, perforce, ought to foreground the criminal introduction of armed thugs into the country by the so-called Provisional National Democratic Congress (P/NDC). And, of course, comprehensive measures must be put in place to ensure the complete disarmament of these thugs.
Needless to say, the recent destruction of some 466 small arms by the collaborative efforts of the military and the police of Ho, in the Volta Region, while commendable, only scratches the bare surface of a much widespread and endemic problem. What needs to be done presently, is to extend this laudable exercise into all the regional capitals as well as towns and villages across the country, wherever the incidence of gun-violence has reached unacceptable levels (Ghanaweb.com 7/27/07).
Then also, the gun-commandeering exercise which recently took place in Ho ought not to become a proverbial nine-day wonder; a comprehensive national anti-gun-violence program ought to be established. For with the recent announcement of the discovery of oil in commercial quantities in the country, if the appropriate measures are not taken, Ghana may well find itself in the throes of the sort of violence that has reportedly gripped the Delta enclave of Nigeria.
Of late, there have been wide speculation and a lot of talk about some major Nigerian-based oil companies moving their headquarters to Ghana. Care must be taken to ensure that only companies with clean commercial records are allowed to move in. then also, the immigration policy of the government needs to be revisited and strengthened in order to maximize our level of national security.
And on the preceding score must also be emphasized the fact that in a country that is woefully under-policed such as ours, the need for some form of gun- and small-arms ownership cannot be totally discounted. For instance, this writer’s maternal grandfather, the Rev. T. H. Sintim, owned a double-barrel gun while the author was growing up. But, interestingly, the gun was largely used for occasional hunting expeditions, and my grandfather never once experienced the necessity of having to use it against any human target. He had purchased it, originally, to ward off potential burglars and armed robbers. The latter appeared to take undue advantage of the old man’s frequent travels on Christian missionary activities; and so the old man taught my grandmother how to shoot, in case the burglars decided to unwisely make the manse a point of call in his absence. And, to be certain, during the twenty or so years that I lived with the old man, he only once had the occasion to use his British-made double-barrel gun; and on the occasion that he did, it was to shoot into the heavens to scare away some burglars who had attempted to meddle with a window and the main door into the manse. I surely hope the Almighty was not hurt!
After the foregoing incident, the burglars never mustered the courage to call again. It appears that they had been spoken to in a language that they found to be much too convincing to controvert.
It is also interesting to recall, in concluding, that during the 1980s, then-Flt.-Lt. Jeremiah John Rawlings told Kenyan scholar and political historian Professor Ali A. Mazrui, that the best method for stanching rampant coups-d’état in Ghana and, indeed, the rest of continental Africa in general, was to “democratize the guns” (see The Africans: A Triple Heritage, both the video-documentary and the textual companion). The patently naïve and outright jejune logic behind Mr. Rawlings’ call for the democratization of the guns, was to supposedly induce a state of political equilibrium, or balance of power. The reality, for the next umpteen years of P/NDC stewardship, was another story altogether.
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