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

In the heat of the Election 2012 Presidential Petition, this mushroom lawyer swore that in the event of the presidential candidate of the main opposition New Patriotic Party (NPP) being declared the winner, he would back military intervention, irrespective of the quality of forensic evidence upon which the verdict of the Supreme Court was based.

Now the same man who publicly claims to have absolutely no respect, whatsoever, for the laws of the land is calling for the issuance of a court injunction to prevent serious allegations made by the ousted Deputy Communications Minister from being broadcast (See "NDC Man Calls for 'State Ban' on Airing of Leaked Tapes" MyJoyOnline.com /Ghanaweb.com 11/12/13).

Much has already been composed and published about what has widely become known as the Vikileaks, and so I prefer to highlight just a few of the salient aspects of the case. In the main, the case regards the secret and unauthorized audiotape-recording of alleged telephone conversations between Ms. Victoria L. Hammah, the recently dismissed Deputy Communications Minister, and some unidentified close friends and associates. In the aforesaid conversations, Ms. Hammah is allegedly heard vowing to stay in government, no matter how unpleasant her job description might be, until she had racked up a fortune in the sum of at least $1 million (in American hard currency).

Even more seriously, Ms. Hammah is also alleged to have further intimated in the said recorded conversations that the Minister for Gender, Children and Social Protection, Mrs. Oye Lithur, had met and criminally attempted to influence the verdict of the nine Supreme Court judges who presided over the Election 2012 Presidential Petition.

What makes the foregoing allegation worthy of an independent judicial enquiry, as already noted in a previous article, is the fact that Mrs. Lithur's husband, Mr. Tony Lithur, represented President Mahama in the 2012 Presidential Election Petition as a defense attorney or the first respondent's counsel. Couple the preceding with the fact that today the Lithurs hold prominent appointments in the Mahama government, and matters begin to assume the epic and proverbial wings of Pergassus.

For Attorney Kakra Essamuah, however, this issue of utmost national security concern is decidedly Cosa Nostra, that is, the exclusively private affair of the key operatives of the ruling National Democratic Congress, and so ought to be regarded as such. Well, the problem with such ratiocinative tack is that it is predictably sophomoric, coming from Mr. Essamuah; it also flagrantly attempts to ride roughshod over the long and deliberate arms of justice by brazenly seeking to ram his own abjectly incompetent interpretation of the law down the throats of those who may not know any better.

Consequently, the unconscionable NDC pit-bull curiously alleges that Mr. Lawrence Quayeson, the man accused of secretly recording Ms. Hammah, while he served as the latter's official driver, and who also reportedly happens to be the blood relation of the ousted minister, is guilty of criminal obstruction of the transmission of what Mr. Essamush bizarrely terms as benign private conversations.

Well, if Mr. Essamuah is so convinced about the legitimacy of Ms. Hammah's patently criminal attempt at public extortion through the instrumentality of her former status as a cabinet appointee, then why is he so deathly afraid about the airing of the already public Vikileak tapes? The mushroom NDC attorney also needs to ask of himself, precisely why Mr. Mahama would so swiftly and summarily show Ms. Hammah, a widely reported close relative of the president, the exit immediately after some leaked versions of the recordings hit the airwaves?

And also, even more significantly, precisely what activity did Mr. Quayeson seek to "obstruct," but Ms. Hammah's pointedly criminal attempt to appropriate her political appointment in ways egregiously inimical to the purposes and objectives for which the subject of legitimate media expose was appointed? Need the yeomanly and laudably patriotic Larry Quayeson have sought express permission from the evidently theft-prone Ms. Hammah before alerting the public to the extra-constitutional shenanigans of the movers and shakers of President Mahama's putative Guinea Fowl and GYEEDA government?

Dear Reader, you be the judge.

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*Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.
Department of English
Nassau Community College of SUNY
Garden City, New York
Nov. 23, 2013
E-mail: okoampaahoofe@optimum.net
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