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

Following the recent report of the total razing to ashes and steel-beams of Mr. Rawlings’ Ridge mansion, a New Patriotic Party (NPP) activist – some news sources claimed “sympathizer” – was alleged to have asserted on a radio talk-show that he was fully convinced that the longtime Ghanaian strongman was his own arsonist. As a direct result of such assertion, Nana Darkwa (Baafi), the alleged slanderer, had been remanded (at the time of this writing) to serve a fortnight at the infamous Nsawam Medium-Security Prison by an Accra circuit court judge. At the time of going to the press with this article (2/21/10), however, the NPP parliamentary opposition was observing a total boycott of legislative proceedings until Attorney-General Betty Mould-Iddrisu definitively desisted from her hell-bent intent of prosecuting Nana Darkwa, who has just be granted bail, to the fullest extent allowable by the law.

That this is a classical test-case of the limits of free speech in Fourth-Republican Ghana can hardly be gainsaid, especially in the wake of Vice-President John D. Mahama’s vaunt of Ghana being poised to herding the rest of Africa into a progressive era of democratic governance and culture. It would therefore come as absolutely no surprise, at all, if it should pan out that President Mills, in fact, had the country’s supposedly exemplary democratic credentials in mind when he hinted of his “apprehension” at the latest exhibition of apparent “judicial vigilantism” among the membership of Ghana’s constitutional Third Estate.

You see, this kind of judicial intimidation and outright persecution of makers of unpopular speech was perfectly normal under the tenure of the Show Boy and his so-called Convention People’s Party (CPP). And then during the 1980s and ’90s Ghanaians witnessed its more hard-edged, or brutal, reprise under Mr. Rawlings. What this means is that, once again, an unsavory “culture of silence” is palling the land. And what also makes it especially dangerous is that this is being allowed to transpire under the tenure of a man who is easily considered to be one of the leading legal lights in our national annals.

Then again, when one talks about the so-called Provisional National Democratic Congress (P/NDC), one is simply talking about a predatory monster clumsily masquerading as a social welfare organization. Else, the President would rather be calling for the immediate release of Nana Darkwa, pending a formal defamation suit from the alleged subject of libelous aspersion.

At any rate, Nana Darkwa’s, admittedly, grievous accusation, at the worst, amounts to the misdemeanor charge of “libel” or “defamation of character,” not a summary criminal prosecution. In sum, it is a civil suit that ought to have been preferred against the alleged culprit; and a civil suit primarily borders on a judicial verdict of retraction and/or monetary damages and a cautionary note, not custodial remand or summary incarceration. In other words, Nana Darkwa has, in reality, committed no criminally culpable act, at all, other than simply impugning the personal and moral integrity of Mr. Rawlings. Unfortunately, what we are witnessing here is an unforgivably stolid attempt by a politically activist section of the Ghanaian judiciary to equate the status of former President Rawlings with that of the Ghanaian state itself, in French monarchical parlance, in other words, “L’Etat Cést Moi,” as Dr. Danquah once rebuked President Nkrumah over the latter’s apparently proprietary attitude towards our country.

In reality, though, while indeed, he remains a quite prominent citizen with the constitutional privilege of extra-security protection, nonetheless, as a “former” premier, rather than a substantive one, Mr. Rawlings is by all intents and purposes a private Ghanaian citizen like everyone else before the law.

Anyway, what needs to be critically examined here and pointedly discussed as a part of our ongoing national discourse on civil rights and responsibilities regards the circumstances under which Nana Darkwa, (as well as another discussant, we have since learned), was confronted during a live broadcast by a Rawlings lackey in tandem with law-enforcement officers who promptly arrested Nana Darkwa, as initial reports indicated. This is also where President Mills needs to firmly assert his constitutional mandate by ensuring, in no uncertain terms, that Monsieur Rawlings and his hangers-on do not recklessly operate within the geopolitical confines of our country as a law unto themselves.

In other words, what the aggrieved ought to have done should have been to deliberately and formally lodge a plaint with a court of law, which would then have summoned the alleged culprits of defamation or libel to appear before a judge in order to forensically substantiate their allegation, failure of which substantiation ought then to have culminated in the awarding of damages to Mr. Rawlings and/or any other aggrieved parties.

As for the outgoing parliamentary Majority Leader’s argument that the NPP parliamentarians’ decision to boycott House proceedings until the Attorney-General unreservedly revokes Nana Darkwa’s prosecution is tantamount to condoning criminality (See “Minority Is Condoning Criminality By Boycotting Parliament”: Bagbin” Peacefmonline.com 2/20/10), merely because the besieged Nana Darkwa is not an MP, smacks of outrageous elitism. Maybe the newly-appointed Minister for Works and Housing ought to be reminded that parliamentarians were elected to represent the people at large, and not to constitute themselves into an exclusive club of “constitutional con-artists.” For get this loud and clear: Nana Darkwa’s claim that Mr. Rawlings set his own house alight is no more criminal than Mr. Rawlings publicly, consistently and incessantly calling President Kufuor and other leading members of the NPP robbers and thieves of our national coffers. Then again, what do you call a representative of the people who unloads $ 40,000-tractors for a pittance of $ 18,000 at public expense? An emulative statesman?

At any rate, the curious notion being bandied about that merely accusing the former premier of setting his own mansion ablaze could trigger a dire state of national upheaval, or crisis, amounts to nothing short of arrant nonsense. Needless to say, not even the PNDC junta’s criminal sponsorship of extra-judicial and ethnic-based assassination of Ghanaian Supreme Court judges triggered any national crisis. In the foregoing 1982 instance, what merely resulted was the deliberately calculated traumatizing of the Ghanaian citizenry at large, especially those of Akan extraction. Another aspect of the “Rawlings Conflagration” that ought to be examined is the personal and political record of the alleged victim of arson himself. Of course, this in no way justifies anybody’s attempt to incriminate Mr. Rawlings and/or his family, friends and associates without providing credible forensic evidence in corroboration of such justiciable accusation.

I am also immitigably miffed by the rather flagrant attempt by some members of the ruling party and government to cheapen the historical significance of the Nsawam Medium-Security Prison in the development, as well as the unconscionable suppression, of contemporary Ghanaian democracy, being that no small number of distinguished and illustrious Ghanaian citizens, including quite a remarkable number of my own relatives, have been deliberately wasted in the Convention People’s Party’s Auschwitz Concentration Camp that was Nsawam.

*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 a Governing Board Member of the Accra-based Danquah Institute (DI), the pro-democracy think tank, and the author of 21 books, including “Abe: Reflections on Love” (Atumpan Publications/Lulu.com, 2007). E-mail: okoampaahoofe@aol.com. ###