An Executive Presidency is not a Dictatorship, Mr. Amaliba

By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.
Garden City, New York
Jan. 10, 2016
E-mail: okoampaahoofe@optimum.net

The National Democratic Congress (NDC) delegates of Bolgatanga, I believe, gave him the sound booting and round rejection that he more than deserved in that party’s most recent 2016 parliamentary primaries, so I wouldn’t waste any time pretending as if Mr. Abraham Amaliba was worth any more than his proverbial 5 pesewas or 5 minutes of infamy. You, the dear reader, may choose your pick.

On the untenably reckless and criminal decision by President John Dramani Mahama to accept some two high-grade terror ex-convicts – the U.S. Pentagon and the State Department preferred to classify them as “low-grade” Jihadist combatants, for obvious reasons – from Yemen with field experience from the Al-Qaeda and Taliban networks for residency in Ghana for at least two years, Mr. Amaliba recently told his audiences that this “kindly gesture” was aimed at “righting a wrong” committed by the United States military and the CIA, when they picked these two men up from the killing fields of Afghanistan and Pakistan (See “Hosting Terror Suspects: Ghana Is Righting U.S. Wrong – Amaliba” MyJoyOnline.com / Ghanaweb.com 1/9/16).

And so maybe somebody ought to ask the NDC Communication Team Member what these two Saudi-born and bred terrorists were doing in the Afghan and Pakistani killing fields, with guns and grenades, when they were captured and summarily dumped at the U.S. Naval Base on Cuba’s Guantanamo Bay. Picking up a consignment of heroin or cocaine for Nayele Ametefe and her key facilitators in the top echelons of the Mahama-led National Democratic Congress’ government? Very likely, President Mahama’s ability and/or capacity to resolutely resist the Obama White House had been appreciably vitiated by the Ghanaian leader’s well-known gross inability to stem the high tide of corruption that has badly frazzled the moral fabric of our fledgling democracy, a scandalous blight of which both President Mahama and his younger brother Ibrahim have been widely and publicly fingered by the media.

The Tehran international incident, in which Mr. Ibrahim Mahama, the proprietor of an entrepreneurial factotum of a firm called Engineers and Planners landed a rented U.S.-registered private plane packed with Ghanaian businessmen in the Iranian capital, which could have well landed the Mahama government in deep trouble with the Obama Administration, must all be factored into this inexcusably dangerous and patently lame decision to accept into our otherwise largely placid and tranquil territorial space, Messrs. Khalid Muhammad Salih al-Dhuby and Mahmud Umar Bin Atef.

We must also quickly add that Mr. Atef is widely reported to have threatened to decapitate the relatives of some prison guards while incarcerated at the Guantanamo Bay’s U.S.-operated Maximum-Security Prison – aka Gitmo – if he could get ready access to them. The guards had apparently done something to rile him up. And so one can just imagine what could happen within the next two years, while these certified terrorists – they are widely reported to have acknowledged their combat experience with Al-Qaeda and the Taliban terror networks – are free to roam the streets and alleyways of Accra, as well as other Ghanaian cities and towns, casing out their new “virgin” territory for a possible exploit/adventure in the near future, if somebody triggered a rise out of either Mr. Atef or Al-Dhuby or both of these men.

We need to also studiously appreciate the general historical dealings and / or relations between Arabs and their Black-African neighbors. Even Black-African Muslims in such volatile spots on the continent as Sudan and Mauritania in recent years. Somebody also needs to ask Mr. Amaliba, who also sits on the Board of Directors of the Ghana National Petroleum Corporation (GNPC), if these two U.S.-certified terrorists were that benign or practically harmless, why the United States, with the best surveillance technological system in the world, had flatly refused to even allow Messrs. Al-Dhuby and Atef to be incarcerated in such globally infamous maximum-security prisons as California’s Alcatraz and New York State’s Sing-Sing.

We should also let it be known to Mr. Amaliba, in crystal-clear terms, that it is not his judgment call, not by any measure or yardstick, to instruct Ghanaian voters on what to do with their ballot papers vis-à-vis the political destiny of President Mahama come November 2016.