Opinions of Monday, 28 January 2019

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

Agalga, NDC only prosecuted underage scapegoats in Dagbon

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James Agalga, the National Democratic Congress’ Member of Parliament for Builsa-North, in the Upper-East Region, who is also a former Mahama-appointed Deputy Interior Minister, must be told upfront and straight to the face that come the 2020 Electioneering Campaign, the Akufo-Addo-led New Patriotic Party (NPP) government intends to make major capital out of the definitive resolution of the Yendi Chieftaincy Crisis, and there is absolutely nothing that freeloading political opportunists like himself can do about it.

If he finds his jacket to have been set on fire by the enviable feat of President Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo in the Dagbon Affair, as it were, by all means, Mr. Agalga can go and burn down the sea (See “Dagbon Rising: ‘It’s Dangerous to Give Akufo-Addo Government All Credit’ – MP” MyJoyOnline.com / Ghanaweb.com 1/26/19).

You see, what is dangerous is the cynical and self-serving refusal by political charlatans like Mr. Agalga and his former boss, former President John Dramani Mahama, among a brigade of others, to honestly accept defeat and the uncontestable fact that their publicly flaunted northern ethnicity and “Non-Kabonga Status” and all, the Mahama-led National Democratic Congress’ regime woefully failed to restore the Dagbon Paramountcy and the Dagomba Kingdom to their former majesty and dignified status. We must also vividly recall the fact that the Atta-Mills government, of which Mr. Mahama was the arch-lieutenant or substantive Vice-President, did little to absolutely nothing to find a lasting solution to the protracted Dagbon Crisis.

Indeed, the two National Democratic Congress’ governments that ruled the nation from 2009 to 2017 actually rounded up vulnerable scapegoats some of whom were mere toddlers when Ya-Naa Yakubu Andani, II, was savagely decapitated, along with some 40 members of his royal court, in 2002, and passed off these toddlers, at least one of whom was 4 years old at the time of the barbaric regicide, and shamelessly told the nation that these were the veritable killers of Ya-Naa Yakubu Andani, II. It would take a crackerjack attorney, Mr. Samuel Atta-Akyea, the current Minister for Housing, to expose the seamy underbelly of what passes for justice in the faux-social democratic camp of the National Democratic Congress. If political scam-artists like Mr. Agalga, at the time of the Kangaroo Trial at issue Ghana’s Deputy Interior Minister, are not cold-calculating criminals, I don’t know what else to make of these unconscionable political opportunists.

You see, the bad news for political con-artists like Mr. Agalga is that even if the landmark resolution of the Dagbon Chieftaincy Crisis were taken off the electioneering campaign platform of the Akufo-Addo-led New Patriotic Party, which, by the way, it absolutely will not, the NPP could still effectively campaign on other equally significant planks verging on our national development agenda, such as President Akufo-Addo’s laudable resuscitation of the effectively bankrupted National Health Insurance Scheme (NHIS) by the GYEEDA taxpayer moola-guzzling operatives of the Mahama-led National Democratic Congress, for which, predictably, then-President John Dramani Mahama mischievously attempted to scapegoat Mr. Sylvester Mensah, then Executive-Director of the National Health Insurance Authority (NHIA), by having the latter arrested and his passport and bank accounts summarily frozen. It would shortly turn out that Mr. Mensah had been arrested and deliberately humiliated for reasons other than his admittedly gross mismanagement of the NHIS.

And, yes, it is true, as Mr. Agalga says, that in 2002, when Ya-Naa Yakubu Andani, II, was brutally slain by some of his own relatives, the now-President Akufo-Addo was the Attorney-General and Minister of Justice. But it must also be significantly pointed out that it was Mr. John Agyekum-Kufuor, and not Nana Akufo-Addo, who was Head-of-State and the substantive President of the Democratic Republic of Ghana; just as it was under the watch of Mr. John Dramani Mahama, and not Deputy Interior Minister James Agalga, when Mr. JB Danquah-Adu, the New Patriotic Party’s Member of Parliament for Akyem-Abuakwa-North, was brutally assassinated in his own bedroom, and the Chief Investigator of Danquah-Adu’s death, COP Dr. George Akuffo-Dampare, was taken off the case by the Mahama-appointed Mr. John Kudalor, the extant Inspector-General of the Ghana Police Service, and functionally demoted from Greater-Accra Regional Commander to the Rector of a Police Training Depot. The fact of the matter is that Nana Akufo-Addo has more than amply demonstrated on more than one occasion that his visionary genius is simple unmatched in more than one sector of our national development effort, including the areas of agricultural development and the introduction of the fee-free Senior High School System.

If Mr. Agalga, like the rest of the double-salary drawing NDC’s ministerial hoodlum pack, finds himself desperately fighting for his political life and his parliamentary seat, this is the direct result of his own gross administrative incompetence, and not merely because President Akufo-Addo has inimitably proven himself to have what it takes to unravel the riddle of the proverbial Oedipian or Theban Sphinx.