Apologies Are No Substitute For Discipline

By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.
Garden City, New York
June 29, 2015
E-mail: okoampaahoofe@optimum.net

This is the one invitation before the Parliamentary Privileges Committee that would definitely not be out of place. I am here, of course, talking about the savage manhandling of the Municipal Chief Executive Officer for Ga-West, Mr. Sam Atuquaye Quaye, who was reportedly beaten up by some thugs alleged to have been hired on behalf of Mr. Naser Mahama Toure, the National Democratic Congress' Member of Parliament for Ayawaso-East Constituency (See "MP Apologizes To MCE After Fuel Station Demolition" MyJoyOnline.com / Ghanaweb.com 6/9/15).

Following laid-down regulations for the demolition of structures erected in waterways, in the wake of June 3 and 4 fiery flood that took in excess of 200 lives, the Municipal Chief Executive Officer ordered a gas station that had been illegally constructed over a waterway to be demolished. What we learn next is that the gas station happened to belong to Mr. Toure, the Ayawaso-East NDC-MP. It clearly appears that the thugs who beat up Mr. Quaye, the Municipal Chief Executive Officer, had envisaged their boss to stand well over and above the zoning laws of the Accra metropolis. We are also told that at least one woman Toure loyalist had stripped naked in a primitive attempt to preventing the law from taking its logical course but, predictably, to no avail.

What is interesting and significant to note here is how Mr. Quaye, the MCE, interposed himself between the law and those alleged hired hands who gave him the beating of his life. It is not clear whether a kickback or some sort of reward had been promised the Ga-West MCE by the Ayawaso-East NDC-MP, but Mr. Quaye would shortly come public to claim that Mr. Toure had visited him and "shown remorse" for the dastardly actions of his men. Well, where I choose to call my home here in the United States, which is Bronx, New York, the "remorseful" rendering of apologies never took the place of legal and/or judicial discipline. For the latter course is about the only way to effectively and definitively deter the cavemen and women who seem to be fast hijacking our civilization from doing so.

In other words, apologies notwithstanding, a man who fully appreciates the stringent rules of civility would have accepted his assailant's apologies but also insisted that the law take its natural and logical course. For, needless to say, the Ayawaso-East MP's apologies clearly seem to have been rendered out of the certain fear of being sanctioned by his colleague operatives of the Parliamentary Privileges Committee. It is also quite certain that Mr. Toure's hired thugs acted the way they did because they had been handed down instructions from their boss to act as such. If not, the fact still stands that there is a need for both Parliament and the Greater-Accra Minister to set up a Committee of Enquiry to probe this matter, in order to ensure that it does not occur to any executive appointees anytime soon. Ghanaian society ought to promptly move away from this cultural no-brainer, whereby anybody could break the law and trade in cheap and half-hearted apologies as a means of avoiding condign justice.

I know it will take a while, but Ghanaians need to quickly wise up to the fact that under no circumstances, whatsoever, should anybody or group of persons take the law into their own hands and hope to readily get away with such act(s) of criminality by simply apologizing for the same. The minimum measure of acceptability ought to be a court-ordered fine, and then an officially and publicly rendered apology.

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