Televising The Akufo-Addo Revolution

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

It is interesting to hear political party activists who initially inveighed against the Akufo-Addo petition hog prime-time megaphones and microphones to praise Chief Justice Wood for finally acceding to vehement requests to have the hearings multicast. The latest of such impudent political activists is Mr. Abu Ramadan, the National Youth Organizer of the People's National Convention (PNC) - (See "Chief Justice Praised for Live Telecast" JoyOnline.com/Ghanaweb.com 4/19/20).

The People's National Convention (PNC) is one of the three or four splinter Nkrumaist political parties that are finding it hard to unite under a single banner, as well as rally behind a consensus candidate in order to become a formidable force on the Fourth Republican Ghanaian political landscape. It is also known as the party of the late President Hilla (Babini) Limann who, in 1979, led the Nkrumah-leaning People's National Party (PNP) to a landslide victory over the Danquah-Dombo-Busia-leaning Popular-Front Party (PFP), led by the late Mr. Victor Owusu and the William (Paa Willie) Ofori-Atta-led United National Convention (UNC).

As I vividly recall, the PNC presidential candidate for Election 2012 was Mr. Ayariga, or somebody with some such name (the man is also known to have a younger brother on the staff of the government of President John Dramani Mahama); and during the televised first Election 2012 Presidential Debate, Mr. Ayariga, who appeared to be both barely articulate and coherent, kept tactically disrupting Nana Akufo-Addo's air time with well-calibrated coughs and ahems - or mischievous throat clearances - in hopes of scoring cheap political points for his fellow northerner, the then-Caretaker President John Dramani Mahama.

It is equally shameful to recall this, but Mr. Ayariga fairly well succeeded in his nefarious objective. It is also equally a damn shame that the sponsors of the debate, the Institute for Economic Affairs (IEA), had not deemed it to be all-too-appropriate to promptly disqualify Mr. Ayariga. What I am indubitably suggesting here is that it is unpardonably hypocritical for the National Organizer of the People's National Convention to be pretending to have been down with the Akufo-Addo program all along, as it were.

In essence, having epically failed to assist Messrs. Mahama and Afari-Gyan to, literally, get away with murder, Mr. Ramadan is now desperately trying to make himself and his party relevant by commending the decision of Chief Justice Georgina Wood to have the Akufo-Addo petition multicast.

Paradoxically, while indeed Chief Justice Wood clearly deserves a modicum of credit for acceding to the rash of requests to have the Akufo-Addo petition proceedings multicast, the main credit really belongs to the Kenyan people, in particular the Kenyan Supreme Court and Mr. Raila Odinga, the main opposition leader. In other words, it was the Kenyans who opened the eyes of their Ghanaian counterparts to the imperative need for a globally transparent democratic judicial culture.

It is my hope that the latter occurrence will become a permanent feature of Ghanaian political and judicial protocol. At any rate, in commending the Chief Justice for allowing the Akufo-Addo/NPP petition to be multicast, the PNC's Mr. Ramadan also had the effrontery to presume to determine who the judicial spokespersons for the country's two major parties ought to be. Needless to say, nothing could be more offensively presumptuous.

Anyway, this is what the website of the radio station Joy-Fm had to report: "[Mr. Ramadan's] worry was how party stalwarts like [Messrs.] Johnson Asiedu-Nketia (General Mosquito) and Kwadwo Owusu-Afriyie (Sir John), general-secretaries for the NDC and the NPP, respectively, 'rush to the media to make false, and sometimes unsavory, comments' about proceedings in court." An interesting observation, indeed, from the national youth organizer of a party whose presidential candidate has carved a niche out of still-birthing the presidential ambitions of Nana Akufo-Addo.

In the magisterial opinion of Mr. Ramadan, only the lead attorneys for the NDC and the NPP, namely, Nana Ato Dadzie and Ms. Gloria Akuffo, respectively, have a legitimate right to regale the public on a punch-by-punch interpretation and analysis of judicial proceedings. Maybe Mr. Ramadan ought to be informed that who else, other than Nana Ato Dadzie and Ms. Gloria Akuffo, has a right or absolutely no right to speak on judicial proceedings vis-a-vis the Akufo-Addo petition, is squarely the especial prerogative of the key operatives of the New Patriotic Party and the National Democratic Congress, and definitely not the judgment call of the national organizer of the People's National Convention.

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*Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.
Department of English
Nassau Community College of SUNY
Garden City, New York
April 20, 2013
E-mail: [email protected]
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