By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.

Under the Kufuor-led New Patriotic Party (NPP) administration, we were constantly being reminded that the spate of crime was way out of control. Ghana’s longest-ruling dictator even used the apparently unacceptable high-crime rate as an electioneering campaign mantra to rocket his ward, Comrade Oguaa Kofi, into the praetor’s chair.

Now, however, it is becoming increasingly evident exactly who the perpetrators of such wanton criminality have always been – Monsieur Rawlings and his NDC Abongo Boys, of course.

Recently, when we heard of the latter, they were all over the country fighting for the managerial control of public toilets. It woefully appears that this is the NDC’s own peculiar spin on the National Youth Employment Program (NYEP). No matter; after all, public latrines are part and parcel of life. And it is quite admirable on their part that the National Democratic Congress has not hesitated at the least available opportunity to drive home to Ghanaians where the party’s utmost priority lies when it comes to our nation’s critical manpower resource development.

It is also interesting that the Atta-Mills government’s first order of business, when it comes to national security, has been to emplace a shoot-to-kill policy as the most effective means of stemming the barbaric tide of armed robbery as well as other quality-of-life menaces. The government, via Interior Minister Cletus Avorka, however, curiously claims that it has not implemented any such shoot-to-kill official policy, even as the minister himself rapturously lauds police officers, and other law-enforcement agents, who have publicly been engaged in this weird extra-judicial culture of counter-violence.

We have absolutely no doubts in our minds, whatsoever, that were fair and thorough investigations to be conducted, as some local media observers have already remarked, it would ruefully be discovered that a quite horrifying percentage of those killed in the name of quality-of-life improvement measures had, in reality, not been involved in any criminal activities at all.

What we are primarily concerned with in this particular instance, however, is the apparent carte blanch with which some publicly supported police personnel have interpreted the rather desperate and outright infantile “unofficial” culture of counter-violence evidently implemented by the Atta-Mills government.

Several days ago, for instance, the eldest son of former deputy Tourism minister, Mr. Kofi Osei-Ameyaw, was brutally shot through the thigh by some armed thugs who were shortly identified as a bona fide part of the membership of the Ghana Police Service (GPS) and were, reportedly, actually employed at the Accra headquarters of the GPS. The shooting itself, from both the accounts of the victim, Mr. Kwesi Osei-Ameyaw, an 18-year-old premed student at the University of Virginia, here in the United States, and Daily Guide reporter Mr. Halifax Ansah-Addo, appears to have occurred randomly, at least going by the manner in which the uniformed police officers, allegedly, trained their gunfire on a group of jolly youths at an Osu night club called Purple Pub.

What appears to be clearly at variance with what we know of random-shooting regards the apparently cold and calculated manner in which the police officers, allegedly, appeared on the scene, clinically discharged their gunfire and deliberately climbed back into their officially issued vehicle, a Tata Mahindra with the registration number of ER 908W, and recklessly sped into the compound of the GPS headquarters, according to eyewitness accounts.

One thing, though, may be difficult to readily discount; and it is the likely fact of this near-fatal incident being part and parcel of the evidently open-season on violence cavalierly precipitated by the so-called Bureau of National Investigation (BNI) on former ministers of state and other ex-government appointees, especially those who served with the Kufuor administration. The phenomenal emergence and rise of cell-/mobile-phone culture in Ghana has almost definitely ensured that such wanton acts of both official and unofficial criminality would be swiftly and deftly orchestrated. It is rather regrettable that this dire aspect of organized criminality has, evidently, yet to be amply caught onto by both Ghanaian media practitioners and the citizenry at large.

And on the latter score, the reference is unmistakably to the emergence of a new and incontrovertibly salutary approach to media praxis called “CITIZEN JOURNALISM.” We most recently witnessed the deft application of the latter in Tehran, the Iranian capital, in the wake of a presidential electoral exercise which was widely believed by both observers inside and outside of that great Middle-Eastern nation to have been rigged by the Ahmedinejad regime. In the wake of the BBC and other reputable foreign reporters being summarily barred from covering the violent demonstrations that ensued, citizens of the latter country used their cell-phones, as well as other audio-visual gadgets, to feed the BBC, CNN and other media organizations around the globe, thereby effectively ensuring that the Iranian government propaganda machinery would not have a proverbial field day. In sum, the fact that not even a single mobile-phone camera appears to have been used by any of the participants at the Purple Pub to “scientifically” and “forensically” identify the alleged rogue cops involved in the shooting of Mr. Kwesi Osei-Ameyaw is, to say the least, rather disturbing. To-date, news reportage appears to be still clumsily following the pre-mobile-phone culture, which is fast becoming passé.

The foregoing notwithstanding there may, of course, be other causal/causative details to this story that have yet to be thoroughly unearthed, and of which details neither the reporter nor even the victim himself may be privy to. And this is precisely why this particular incident requires further investigation.

The Inspector General of Police (IGP) and the Attorney-General (A-G) also ought to be hot on the trail of the alleged suspects, being that there clearly appears to be strong evidence indicative of some level of official complicity in the alleged crime. This call is being made irrespective of the prominent parental status of the primary victim involved, but more significantly because it does not tell a good and dignified story about both the professional caliber of the personnel who constitute the Ghana Police Service, and particularly the country’s image abroad as a staid, polished and placid democratic culture, even under such an iconically splotchy regime as the NDC.

Then also, Ghana’s parliament may have to promptly review the emergency procedure for administering treatment to victims of brutal physical assault and other forms of serious accidents at our nation’s major hospitals and health centers, including the 37 Military Hospital, where the younger Mr. Osei-Ameyaw was first transported but flatly refused emergency treatment, reportedly, for the lack of an available official incident report from the police.

What I am advocating here is something akin to the strict adherence to the professional military credo of “promptly obeying commands and asking questions later.” Why, for instance, couldn’t the 37 Military Hospital personnel have administered the requisite emergency treatment on the shooting victim while they awaited transmission of the official incident report from the GPS? Or is it just that our soldiers are not adequately trained to value the sacredness of human life, like their counterparts elsewhere around the globe?

*Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D., is Associate Professor of English, Journalism and Creative Writing at Nassau Community College of the State University of New York, Garden City. He is also a Governing Board Member of the Accra-based Danquah Institute (DI), the pro-democracy think-tank, and the author 20 books, including “Ghanaian Politics Today” (Atumpan Publications/Lulu.com, 2008). E-mail: okoampaahoofe@aol.com. ###