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

Following the very astute decision of the judge in the Ya-Na regicide case to set free the scapegoats deliberately paraded by the National Democratic Congress government, represented by the Attorney-General, as the prime suspects, in a bid to scoring cheap political points, early last year, an angry Dr. Kwabena Adjei issued a thinly veiled threat against the Ghanaian judiciary whose membership, the National Chairman of the NDC rabidly accused of pathological bias against his party. “There are many ways of killing a cat,” the NDC chairman warned.
Back then, those of us who vividly recalled the bloody track-record of the Rawlings-led Provisional National Democratic Congress (P/NDC), counter-warned Dr. Adjei to be fully mindful of the fact that far gone were the days when the P/NDC brutally pursued a political culture of impunity.
What we are trying to highlight here is the fact that it came as all-too-logical to those of us who have been studiously following the rhetorically violent, and abjectly rude, career of the NDC national chairman that any group of people would attempt to endanger his life (See “I Know Who Wants to Kill Me – Kwabena Adjei” Ghanaweb.com 12/23/11).
According to Dr. Adjei, an unspecified number of would-be assassins recently, and for the second time, attempted to rub him out. We are further informed that this anonymous group only failed in the attempt because, somehow, they were too daft – or clinically stupid – or even professionally incompetent to have readily mistaken his next-door neighbor for the widely known and chronically loudmouthed and decidedly nasty Dr. Adjei!
Maybe in Ghana this kind of political poppycock makes public sense. The fact of the matter is that any professionally trained group of assassins is highly unlikely to mistake an overexposed media personality like Dr. Kwabena Adjei for his next-door neighbor. I have a simple theory here: and it is that the NDC chairman, in all probability, staged his own assassination attempt in order to both attract further attention and sympathy for whatever shenanigans he must have been up to in recent weeks and months.
It is also interesting that Dr. Adjei would rather so curiously speculate that any group of people who may be interested in either taking or endangering his life, may solely be interested in doing so based on the fact of him being widely known to sport a blunt and (obnoxiously) outspoken personality. And, in fact, this may just well be the case. Still, would it not have been more professionally savvy and forensically helpful to the Madina police, to whom the NDC chairman has allegedly lodged a complaint, for Dr. Adjei to have privately provided Commander Joseph Owusu-Bempah, the Madina Police Station superintendent, with such wildly speculative investigative lead, rather than going public with the same?
Needless to say, a far more productive lead may likely come from Dr. Adjei’s next-door neighbor who had, allegedly, been mistakenly picked up and released, after the alleged would-be assassins had apparently satisfied themselves that Dr. Adjei’s anonymous next-door neighbor was not the intended target of their attack.
Then also, absolutely no helpful description is given regarding the general appearance of the alleged members of the group of would-be-assassins for any observant or critically thinking potential witnesses or unwitting onlookers to make any plausible sense as to whether, indeed, the alleged posse of “Adjei-Hunters,” reasonably fit the standard description of hired guns or potential assassins.
Still, as I have steadily maintained time and again, knowing what most Ghanaians know about the bloody history of the party that Jerry John Rawlings built, it would be quite a great wonder if this posse of hired guns or goons, allegedly, of course, turned out to belong to any other political faction than our good, old National Decapitators’ Congress. And as the Akan proverb goes: “The critter that would bite you, often comes from the frills of your own cloth.”
*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 Director of The Sintim-Aboagye Center for Politics and Culture and author of “Ghanaian Politics Today” (Lulu.com, 2008). E-mail: okoampaahoofe@optimum.net.
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