Will NDC put Ghana on the brink of civil strife?

By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.
Garden City, New York
July 28, 2016
E-mail: okoampaahoofe@optimum.net

The response that greeted the wrist-slapping sentencing of the Montie-Fm Three, who reportedly threatened to execute five members of the Ghana Supreme Court, from the leaders of the Mahama-led government of the National Democratic Congress, could at best be described as unacceptable and flagrantly benighted. Indeed, the one predictable adjective that ran through the disparate executive reaction was “harsh.” But we are also ineffably elated by the steely determination of the presiding judge, Justice Sophia Akuffo, not to be intimidated by both the swashbuckling Mahama Posse and the latter’s assigns and surrogates.

In sentencing the criminal convicts to the relatively wrist-tapping prison term of 4 months, Justice Akuffo was also reported to have bitterly criticized the Attorney-General and Minister of Justice, Mrs. Marietta Brew Appiah-Oppong, for failing to take prompt action against the Montie Three, namely, Messrs. Alistair Tairo Nelson, Godwin Ako Gunn and Salifu Maase, popularly known as Mugabe, the host of the radio talk-show program on which the criminal remarks against the justices of the Supreme Court were allegedly made by Messrs. Nelson and Gunn (See “Supreme Court not Happy with Attorney-General in Montie-Fm Saga” 3News.com / Ghanaweb.com 7/27/16).

“There is an element of criminality in their utterances which the Attorney-General should have noticed and [promptly] acted upon,” the presiding judge was widely reported to have observed. The latter observation strikingly supports my own observation, in a previous column, that the Montie Three may be in the pay of the Mahama government, and may very well have been sponsored by highly placed elements inside the Flagstaff House. At any rate, what makes the threats by the three criminal convicts even more grievous is the fact that at least two of the men are alleged to have made smug references to the darkest period in the country’s postcolonial judicial history, namely, the savage abduction and Mafia-style execution of Justices Cecilia Koranteng-Addow, whose husband had also once served as the country’s Attorney-General and Minister of Justice; Fred Poku-Sarkodie, who had been serving as a bona fide justice of the Supreme Court since the Nkrumah era; and Kwadwo Agyei Agyepong.

That the brutal assassination of these front-bench judicial luminaries had an inescapable tinge of ethnic cleansing, was eloquently brought to light by the members of the blue-ribbon Azu-Crabbe Commission that meticulously investigated the crimes and issued what became known as the SIB Report or the Special Investigations Board’s Report. We also know full well that shortly after the publication of the SIB Report, some members of the Azu-Crabbe Commission received anonymous letters warning them to either vamoose into involuntary exile or their safety could not be guaranteed.

Many years later, this writer personally met with and interviewed one of the Azu-Crabbe Commission’s members, a distinguished law professor who had been Dean of the University of Ghana’s Faculty of Law at the time and later also headed one of the overseas legal programs of Temple University, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, in Athens, Greece. I will not mention the subject’s name, except to observe on the strength of first-hand information that the subject was very pointedly clear in his mind and conscience that the warning letter threatening to have him and several of colleagues on the Azu-Crabbe Commission with summary liquidation had directly come from the Osu Castle, the seat of government at the time.

Unfolding events surrounding the Montie Three and their sponsors and paymasters clearly indicate that the Mahama regime is hell-bent on entrenching itself at the Flagstaff House by all available coercive means, including judicial nullification and the unconstitutional use of the police to criminally interfere with social networks in the lead-up to the 2016 general election. The Inspector-General of Police, Mr. John Kudalor, a recent Mahama appointee, has made threatening public remarks to the same effect, which almost immediately prompted Dr. Mohammed Ibn Chambas, the United Nation’ Secretary-General’s representative for the sub-region, to express the utter displeasure of the executive operatives of the peace-maintaining global organization. We hope the Mahama Posse fully appreciates the dire implications of attempting to undermine the hard-fought democratic, civil and human rights of the Ghanaian people.

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