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Opinions of Thursday, 16 January 2020

Columnist: Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.

A former president has already assassinated a sitting president

President Akufo-Addo President Akufo-Addo

He may very well be feeling uneasy or even blood-dripping guilty, perhaps, for being privy to the brutally deft assassination of then-sitting President John Evans Atta-Mills on July 12, 2012. Which may pretty much explain the angry reaction of Mr. Samuel George Nartey, the National Democratic Congress’ Member of Parliament for the Ningo-Prampram Constituency, in the Greater-Accra Region, to a “prophetic message” delivered not very long by Pastor Isaac Owusu-Bempah, one of the leading one-man church leaders, to the effect that a former President was poised to liquidating a sitting President so that the former could assume the constitutional powers of the latter.

The fact of the matter, as already adumbrated at the beginning of this column, is that, indeed, what Pastor Owusu-Bempah predicted actually came to pass nearly seven years ago ( See “This 2020 ‘Imbecility’ Happening at Your End Won’t Be Tolerated – Sam George to Peace Council” Ghanaweb.com 1/3/20).

As we all must vividly recall, at the time, then-Vice-President John Dramani Mahama, who had officially broken the news to the rest of the nation, both then and to this day, did not demonstrate any courtesy or respect for the very people who had offered the presidential mandate to both Messrs. John Evans Atta-Mills, the recently deceased substantive President of the Sovereign Democratic Republic of Ghana and the Commander-in-Chief of the Ghana Armed Forces, and to then-Vice-President John Dramani Mahama, precisely what had been clinically ascertained by medical specialists to have been the cause of the death of Mr. Mahama’s immediate boss.

Instead, the then-Vice-President John Dramani Mahama went straight in his speech to heartily celebrate what the latter than jubilantly claimed to be an auspicious act of “Divine Providence” who, in his “inscrutable wisdom,” had decided to deftly and opportunely sweep the late President John Evans Atta-Mills out of the way, in order to smoothly and gracefully make way for the accession to the Presidency of the first Ghanaian citizen to have been born in the immediate post-independence era.

Indeed, even as I write, Ghanaians have yet to receive a comprehensive statement and/or report about the cause of death of the first Fourth-Republican President to die in office. The shock and the pity here is that in spite of the preceding question mark that still hangs over his pate, the movers-and-shakers of the present main opposition National Democratic Congress (NDC) went right ahead, with absolutely no formidable opposition, to re-nominate the man who must bear the full-brunt of the “mysterious” circumstances leading to the death of President John Evans Atta-Mills for a second nonconsecutive shot at the Presidency.

I have extensively written about this most serious matter and hereby reprise the same, which is that President Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo has a bounden obligation to open a full-scale enquiry into the events and circumstances surrounding the death of the man who fiercely contested and narrowly defeated the former Attorney-General and Minister of Justice in the polls in the 2008 Presidential Election, just as Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo was able to fully bring Mr. Alfred Agbesi Woyome, the NDC’s foremost financier and the most infamous burglar of Ghana’s National Treasury in the postcolonial era to account.

I am, however, at a loss to figure out precisely why the Ningo-Prampram NDC’s Member of Parliament appears to be fully convinced that the “prophetic revelation” of Pastor Owusu-Bempah was, somehow, a direct personal attack viciously aimed at the leader of the National Democratic Congress and Mr. Nartey’s former paymaster, while the latter was labeled a Presidential Staffer at the Mahama Flagstaff House, presently renamed Jubilee House, through the legitimate and savvy issuance of a legal document by President Akufo-Addo and statutorily or constitutionally ratified by Parliament.

The most significant problem standing in the way of the leaders of the National Democratic Congress, aside from their pathological and thoroughgoing corrupt tendencies, is the woeful inability of this hoodlum pack of unconscionable assassins and kleptocratic coconspirators is the Problem of Truth, that is, the frank and honest acceptance of the Truth, when forensically sustainably confronted with the same.

By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., PhD

English Department, SUNY-Nassau

Garden City, New York

E-mail: okoampaahoofe@optimum.net

Visit my blog at: kwameokoampaahoofe.wordpress.com Ghanaffairs