Opinions of Sunday, 17 June 2007
Columnist: Okoampa-Ahoofe, Kwame
The NPP Must Prepare for War!
Among the interesting and revelatory issues that emerged out of Mr. Rawlings and his so-called National Democratic Congress’ celebration of their June 4, 1979 assassination of Mr. Rawlings’ predecessors, was a crude public statement regarding the intention of the NDC to plunge Ghana into a sanguinary state of civil strife. And to be certain, this is no revelation at all, for Mr. Rawlings and his minions have been deafeningly drumming such intention into the ears of Ghanaians ever since President John Agyekum-Kufuor assumed the reins of governance in January 2001.
Hitherto, Mr. Rawlings, even as an “elected” leader of Ghana, time and time again missed no occasion to emphasize his pet aversion for the democratic rule of law. Needless to say, both June 4, 1979 and December 31, 1981 were about anything but the democratic rule of law.
And then a few weeks prior to Mr. Rawlings’ declaration of war at Somanya on June 4, 2007, the former AFRC/PNDC chairman’s lapdog, Dr. Tony Aidoo, was widely quoted by the Ghanaian media as having described the country as one that was ripe for at least twenty coups-d’état. On the preceding occasion, some of us were delicately perched on the edge of our seats, waiting for the Attorney-General and Minister of Justice to either call Dr. Aidoo to order or even demand that Mr. Rawlings’ most stentorian lapdog explain himself to either the Ghana Supreme Court and/or the nation, and citizenry, at large. Alas, nothing of the foregoing nature came to pass.
And so, today, we find it imperative to alert the Government of the New Patriotic Party (NPP), in particular President J. A. Kufuor, to the fact that the democratic rule of law does not imply according carte-blanche to such security-menacing statements as that which was recently attributed to Dr. Tony Aidoo. And much more so, in view of the fact of the would-be mayhem-maker having served as Deputy Defense Minister under the government of the so-called Provisional National Democratic Congress (P/NDC), and therefore being an influential and privileged Ghanaian.
Indeed, the problem with the current patently disruptive behavior of the entire executive membership of the so-called National Democratic Congress is the curious fact that the core criminal elements among the pack, including the party’s founder and leader, have never been arraigned before a legitimately constituted court of law – national or international – to account for their flagrant criminality and be promptly meted condign justice. In sum, it embarrassingly appears that the entire membership of the NDC has woefully misconstrued the Christocentric and conciliatory gesture of the Kufuor Administration to be a veritable mark of craven diffidence, or outright cowardliness.
Interestingly, however, as this writer pointed out not quite awhile ago, when certain leading members of the NDC, among them its General-Secretary, threatened to hold the NPP responsible for any untoward event that befell its fire-and-brimstone-spitting founder and leader, the Asante, Akyem, Gonja, Akwamu, Fante, Bono and Adansi empires and states of Ghana, among a host of others, were not founded by cowards of whose descendants the bulk of contemporary Ghanaians are. In sum, and time is of the essence, it is high time the NPP Government came to terms with the unmistakable and inevitable fact that the opposition, so-called National Democratic Congress has everything to do with anything by democracy, justice and the civic rule of law. And also that it is time for President Kufuor and his Government to initiate war crimes proceedings against Mr. Rawlings and his cohorts, or find our dear country plunged into a protracted and internecine civil war come January 2009 or even before!
Needless to say, at the judicial minimum, Mr. Rawlings may have to be promptly conducted into exile, into whatever country or location that may be deemed mutually acceptable by the parties involved, including, of course, the principals of the land of protective domiciliary.
And here must also be emphasized the fact that the “Somanya Convocation” of the NDC saw the radar of possible criminal design trained on the integrity of the President’s family itself! And with the brutal assassination of the three Supreme Court judges and the retired Ghana Army major freshly in mind, it would only be foolhardy for anybody to casually ignore the possibility of the “revolution”-mongering and blustering Mr. Rawlings and his lackeys launching another such sanguinary season of Ethnic-Cleansing on the President’s family, in particular, and Ghanaians at large.
Needless to say, in 1979, Ghanaians witnessed the blanket destruction of indigenous entrepreneurship, beginning with the senseless demolition of the Makola Market and then the summary expropriation of Ghanaian-owned businesses. Thus, when NDC stalwart and Member of Parliament Mr. Enoch Teye Mensah asserts that: “One of the children of President John Agyekum Kufuor has been able to mobilize several billions of cedis to acquire a hotel, while the whole country could not mobilize enough money to provide power for the people and they have to sleep in darkness” (The New Ghanaian 6/7/07), nobody needs to have a doctoral degree in Rocket, or Space, Science in order to fully appreciate the ominous thrust of Mr. Mensah’s assertion.
Interestingly, however, even though Mr. Mensah himself is not widely known to have been an honest Chief Executive Officer of the Accra metropolis while he supposedly managed it, for Ghanaians with short memories, and they are legion, particularly those who benefited from Mr. Mensah’s widely observed acts of misprision, his brazenly self-righteous vitriol against the Kufuor family may not be readily seen for its abject hypocrisy; this latter observation, in no way, implicitly or explicitly, seeks to either corroborate or invalidate Mr. Mensah’s assertion, however.
Even more significant is the NDC General-Secretary’s insolent vow to seek a judicial injunction against the NPP’s salutary establishment of the Community Protection Assistants’ program (CPAs), under the Kufuor Administration’s Youth Employment Program, as a constructive means of reducing the recent high spate of criminal activity around the country. According to Mr. Johnson Asiedu Nketia, the NPP’s good-faith attempt to reducing the country’s high-crime wave – which, by the way, was singularly created by Mr. Rawlings, through the former pseudo-civilian president’s massive supply of AK-47s to his so-called Commando Forces – is, curiously, tantamount to the NPP’s supposed preparation towards the rigging of the 2008 general elections” (The New Ghanaian 6/7/07).
Still, here again, it was the ever-bumbling Professor John Evans Atta Mills who eloquently gave the lie to the utter bankruptcy of the NDC’s campaign platform, when the former Rawlings second-bananas asked his supporters and sympathizers to join together with him in order to “eliminate poverty, discrimination and ethnicity [sic]” which, according to Professor Mills, had been created by the Kufuor Government.
Views expressed by the author(s) do not necessarily reflect those of GhanaHomePage.
