Stop These Acts Of Desperation, Dr. Omane-Boamah!

By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.
Garden City, New York
E-mail: [email protected]

I have advised President Mahama in this very column to promptly reassign his indescribably and inexcusably incompetent Communications Minister to one of those boondocky health clinics on the Okwawu scarp, where Dr. Edward Omane-Boamah grew up. He would be of much better use in rural Okwawu, especially now that the strain of the doctors's strike appears to be nowhere near resolving (See "Disguised Censorship" Daily Guide / Modernghana.com 8/14/15). We did not fight twenty years of the Rawlings dictatorship, only to be faced with a Mahama-chaperoned police state, as the afore-referenced Daily Guide editorial put it.

I hope this is not true, but if it is, indeed, true that the Mahama-led government of the National Democratic Congress (NDC) has imposed restrictions on the movements of foreign media operatives in the country, then this must be roundly condemned and fiercely fought. Short of national security installations, only a handful of which I could readily name, such censorship is inexcusably absurd. The Daily Guide's editorial writer is spot on in poignantly observing that such communist-style censorship is an eerie signal of the government's intention of intimidating local media operatives and organizations into a virtual culture of the sort of silence that prevailed for nearly twenty years under the Rawlings-led Provisional National Defense Council (PNDC) and, subsequently, the National Democratic Congress.

The original precedence, of course, was set by the Nkrumah-led Convention People's Party (CPP). Legend has it that seven years after Ghana's declaraton of sovereignty from British colonial rule, there existed not a single privately-owned newspaper in the country (See Dennis Austin's Ghanaian Politics: 1946-1960). Well, nearly two generations on, there is still a critical mass of those who would have us return to the Gold Age of our geopolitical freedom. President Mahama's father, Mr. Emmanuel Adama Mahama, served the "Osagyefo" faithfully as the first postcolonial Northern Regional Minister; and so no one ought to be surprised that the son would be goose-stepping the same tyrannical path as his late father's icon and political mentor.

Indeed, one can aptly presume the younger Mr. Mahama to be set on the same sinister political course as his father's infamous boss. Recently, when I came across an article bitterly lambasting Ms. Samia Yaba Nkrumah, the Chairperson of the rump-Convention People's Party (r-CPP), written by the maternal nephew of one of the Show Boy's arch-lieutenants, and making the tired and historically extravagant claim of President Nkrumah's being the "Founder of Ghana," I chuckled to myself and wondered what the reaction of these fanatical Nkrumacrats would be, if I also wrote a rejoinder to the said article calling Mr. Nkrumah "The Founder of Political Corruption in Modern Ghana."

I know President Mahama and his Flagstaff House Abongo Boys may have a lot to hide from the rest of us. But exactly what, besides the rank corruption of which many of us already have far more knowledge than our cranial sponges can handle, is not clear to yours truly. Whatever guidelines may exist for regulating the movements of foreign journalists operating in the country ought to be clearly spelled out in the 1992 Constitution, or ought to have been approved by Parliament and made available to the National Media Commission (NMC), and then to all media establishments in the country. But guess what, the same sort of media censorship alleged to have been imposed on foreign media operatives by the Minister of Communications existed under the Nkrumah-led regime of the Convention People's Party.

There are several documented instances of foreign media operatives having been deported from the country, the most striking example of which was the Bankole Affair. But what exactly are Dr. Omane-Boamah and his boss trying to hide from these foreign journalists that the rest of the world does not already know? The Stygian filth that Mr. Mahama and his Abongo Boys do not seem to have any creative talent or the appetite for eliminating or drastically reducing, maybe?

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