Ghanaian political commentator and activist Alfred Ababio Kumi popularly known as Adentan Kumi has issued a strongly worded open letter to former President Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo, urging him to speak out against what he describes as an “alarming assault on free speech” under the administration of President John Mahama.

In the letter, titled “Petition to Break Your Loud Silence on the Attack on Free Speech,” Kumi reminds the former president of his legacy as a champion of civil liberties.

He recalls Akufo-Addo’s role as “a standard-bearer of our democratic conscience,” highlighting his participation in historic demonstrations to defend Ghanaians’ right to free expression.

According to Kumi, that hard-won freedom is now under serious threat.

“Under the watch of President John Mahama, the attack on free speech is no longer a whisper but a daily practice,” he wrote.

“Citizens, especially those of us in the New Patriotic Party, are arrested as if the right to speak were a favour to be granted or withdrawn. Bail conditions are turned into theatre: punitive, humiliating, a spectacle meant to warn the next voice that dares to rise.”

Kumi further accused the governing National Democratic Congress (NDC) of hypocrisy, noting that the party once “enjoyed the fullest freedom to speak truth to power,” criticising Akufo-Addo’s government without fear. Yet, he claimed, some NDC figures today “boast openly that they can use our very IP addresses to trace our conversations turning the tools of modern communication into weapons of intimidation.”

The activist challenged Akufo-Addo, now regarded as a statesman, to use his influence to hold the Mahama administration accountable to its own pledge of a national “reset.”

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“If this is the reset, then let him be honest and call it what it has become: a relapse into the old revolutionary romance,” Kumi asserted, warning against “a revival of instincts that once bragged, when it comes to unleashing violence, we know how to unleash violence.”

He contrasted the NDC’s revolutionary slogans, “Cadres will go, cadres will come but the revolution has come to stay… Revo, revo, revolution!” with Ghana’s democratic ideals.

“Leaders will go, leaders will come; politicians will go, politicians will come but the only thing that has truly come to stay is democracy. And democracy and not revolution, is the long journey still ahead of us,” he declared.

Kumi concluded his letter with a direct appeal to Akufo-Addo, “Your voice is needed, Sir. Needed to call the current leadership back to the path of constitutional order; needed to tell Ghanaians that the fight you once led was not theatre but covenant. We will speak again this will not be the last letter.”



Also, watch some videos from the NPP’s protest below: