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General News of Friday, 4 April 2003

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"I'm No Rat" - Kwesi Pratt

At Wednesday’s National Reconciliation Commission sitting, after an eloquent but desperate manoeuvre to ‘justify’ his extra-judicial killings, WO1 (rtd) Joseph Kwabena Adjei Boadi, the legendary “Butcher of PNDC,” turned his fire on Kwesi Pratt Jnr, a known long time critic and victim of the PNDC regime and Managing Editor of the Insight, accusing him of betraying his own comrade, Kweku Baako Jnr, Editor-in-chief of the Crusading Guide to the PNDC.

But, Kwesi Pratt has shot back describing the former PNDC hit man as a desperate sinking schizophrenic, who is hell-bent “to sink with everybody.” Schizophrenia is a disease of the mind, symptoms of which include delusions, hallucinations, thought disorder and split personality. Adjei Boadi told a stunned NRC audience that Kwesi Pratt caused the arrest of Kweku Baak Jnr under the PNDC, and without his timely intervention, Kwesi Pratt’s betrayal would have led to Kweku Baako’s death the very night of the arrest. “I told Chairman Rawlings that if Kweku Baako [was] killed, the whole revolution would be defeated.

That saved him,” said the man, who confesses to ‘ordering’ the cold-blood murder of six detained unarmed men. Determined to buttress what appears to be a very wild allegation, the self-confessed chief operation officer of PNDC’s “Operation Search and Destroy,” told the Commission that Kwesi Pratt was all along operating as a double-agent, informing on his friends and colleagues within the anti-PNDC circles. Further information reaching The Statesman is that Adjei Boadi now feels his life is on the line.

He is said to feel threatened from all sides – from victims and old colleagues alike, some of whom are said to find his seeming unpredictability extremely worrying. A source close to the security apparatus says police protection has been offered to Adjei Boadi and he has accepted. But, taking a sniper’s shot at Kwesi Pratt at the NRC this week, WO1 Adjei Boadi said the leading CPP member goes about telling the world that he was detained more than fifteen times under Rawlings’ dictatorship.

But Adjei Boadi argued that under that military regime, which lasted eleven years, nobody could sincerely expect to be detained three times for political dissent and have his life sparred. Thus, he added, Kwesi Pratt was deliberately planted among political prisoners to get insider information on conspiracies against the unconstitutional regime.

This allegation suggest that Kwesi Pratt was actively contributing towards the protection and consolidation of the Provisional National Defence Council – the very gang that overthrew the Nkrumaist government of Dr Hilla Limann. “Kwesi Pratt was working under serious secrecy which I did not understand,” grimacing with his suggestively stained teeth, ‘Killer’ Adjei Boadi added, “The same person would tell you that he is working hard to bring order into the system, but the same person was inciting the soldiers against us.”