Opinions of Thursday, 4 February 2016

Columnist: Okoampa-Ahoofe, Kwame

Don’t be a hypocrite, Mr. Mahama

By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.
Garden City, New York
Dec. 24, 2015
E-mail: okoampaahoofe@optimum.net

Make no mistake. I take the brutal assassinations of Messrs. Adams Mahama and Abubakar Saddiq very seriously, even as those of you who have been reading my columns for a considerable while can readily attest. What I detest most, however, is this self-righteous posture assumed by President John Mahama and his associates and minions of the National Democratic Congress (NDC), as if to imply that the country’s main opposition New Patriotic Party (NPP) was the most violent major political organization.

Even as I write, the brutal murderer or murderers of former Nkwanta-South District Chief Executive Peter Kojo Kenyenso have yet to be arraigned before a legitimately constituted court of the land. There are claims of the police having arrested at least some 8 criminal suspects alleged to have had a hand in the slaying of Mr. Kenyenso, who was gunned down at point-blank range from behind at his private residence on Nov. 3, 2014.

What is ironic to observe is that the slain Mr. Kenyenso was also a member of the Volta Regional Security Council. That the security apparatus erected around the late Nkwanta-South District Chief Executive (DCE), assuming that there really existed any such arrangement at all, was porous enough to allow the man to be so easily liquidated is one that ought to preoccupy the President, because it was Mr. Mahama who directly appointed Mr. Kenyenso to the job during whose performance the Nkwanta-South DCE was brutally gunned down.

Maybe the fact that the National Democratic Congress and its political and ideological antecedent, the so-called Provisional National Defense Council (PNDC), has a long track-record of violence is what appears to have made it quite acceptable for the Mahama posse to have become so flagrantly lax in its purported search for the killers of Mr. Kenyenso. It is also significant to observe that the family members and relatives of the slain DCE have virulently accused Mr. Mahama of having snubbed them by his conspicuous failure to attend the funeral and burial services for Mr. Kenyenso.

And so it can only came as very hypocritical for the President to be pretending as if he really cared about the acid-dousing assassination of Mr. Adams Mahama, the former Upper-East Regional Chairman of the New Patriotic Party (NPP), and the equally savage stabbing death of Mr. Abubakar Saddiq, a staunch Akufo-Addo partisan from the Kumasi-Asewase Constituency of the New Patriotic Party. Really, I hate to say this, but the infamous Shit-Bomber couldn’t care any more about Messrs. Mahama and Saddiq than he cared about 45-year-old Mr. George Boateng, going into his “unopposed” primary reelection bid as the 2016 Presidential Candidate of the National Democratic Congress.

Well, President Mahama has been quoted to be saying that “No amount of political power is worth the drop of blood of any single Ghanaian.” Now, that is laudable talk, except that talk is too cheap to make a whit of a difference, particularly when such talk is coming from the lips of the man who has been shamelessly supporting the unholy cause of Mr. Paul Afoko, the indefinitely suspended NPP National Chairman, whose younger brother, Mr. Gregory Afoko, is currently standing trial as prime suspect in the brutal acid-dousing assassination of Mr. Adams Mahama, who was also widely known to have been an inveterate internal political opponent of the suspended NPP National Chairman.

We must also quickly add, for the avoidance of all doubts that the elder Mr. Afoko had abortively attempted to cop an alibi for his brother Gregory in the wake of the latter’s alleged brutal slaying of Mr. Mahama. As of this writing, a little over a month after the fact, some of the people allegedly involved in the slaying of Mr. Abubakar Saddiq, including Mr. Isaac Brenya, the NPP Constituency Chairman of Kumasi-Asewase, were reported to have been arrested and charged with the stabbing death of Mr. Saddiq. The real killer or the man who actually stabbed Mr. Abubakar Saddiq to death, a Mr. Duna, alias Mahamudu, was, however, reported to be still at large.

A warrant had, however, been issued for the prompt arrest of Mr. Duna and the latter’s arraignment before a legitimately constituted court of criminal adjudication. We shall be studiously following events and commenting on the same, as deemed warranted, for the benefit of our readers.

*Visit my blog at: kwameokoampaahoofe.wordpress.com Ghanaffairs