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Opinions of Monday, 8 August 2016

Columnist: Okoampa-Ahoofe, Kwame

How do you measure remorse, Mr. Adams?

Kofi Adams Kofi Adams

Gauging the reaction of the supporters and sympathizers of the Montie Three, who were convicted and sentenced by the Supreme Court of Ghana to 4 months’ imprisonment, one readily comes to the conclusion that approximately half of the adult population of the country is composed of the clinically retarded.

It dispiritingly appears that so decadent has our culture become that many a supporter or sympathizer of the Montie Three could clearly be envisaged to be having an extremely difficult time in coming to terms with the moral aspect of the sentencing of Messrs. Salifu Maase (aka Mugabe), Alistair Nelson and Godwin Ako Gunn.

And such difficulty was not restricted or peculiar to the lowly educated and/or economically deprived in Ghanaian society. To be certain, as of this writing, nearly half of the members of the Mahama cabinet, among them Ghana’s Foreign Minister, Ms. Hanna Tetteh; the Culture and Tourism Minister, Mrs. Elizabeth Ofosu-Agyare; and Mrs. Nana Oye Lithur, the Minister for Gender, Children and Social Protection, had signed onto a petition calling on President John Dramani Mahama to promptly and summarily nullify the Supreme Court’s verdict and sentencing.

What is fascinating here is that all these three female cabinet appointees are mothers who claim to be feminist-oriented. That they see absolutely nothing wrong with the sentencing of a man who threatened to rape Chief Justice Georgina Theodora Wood boggles the imagination, especially coming on the heels of vehement calls by these same women for Mr. Kennedy Ohene Agyapong, the New Patriotic Party’s Member of Parliament for Assin-Central, in the Central Region, to offer an unqualified public apology to the Chairwoman of the so-called Independent Electoral Commission (EC), for allegedly impugning the chastity of Mrs. Charlotte Kesson-Smith Osei.

Mr. Agyapong has even been reported to the Parliamentary Committee on Privileges by the same gang of NDC female politicos for sanctioning, because Mr. Agyapong had dared to suggest during an electioneering campaign tour of the Asante Region that he was in possession of reliable information indicating that Mrs. Osei had secured her current post as EC Chair by means other than her professional qualifications. Actually, the media mogul had suggested that Mrs. Osei may have offered sexual favors to President John Dramani Mahama.

Now Mr. Kofi Adams, the foulmouthed National Organizer of the National Democratic Congress (NDC), has predictably weighed in on the controversy surrounding the sentencing of the Montie Three to 4 months’ prison terms apiece.

As usual, Mr. Adams is trying to second-guess the members of our august Supreme Court on the curious grounds that not only was the sentencing of the Montie Three to 4 months’ imprisonment “harsh,” the trio had also shown remorse.

Does “remorse” really offset or automatically negate the gravity of the threat posed by Messrs. Nelson, Gunn and Maase to Chief Justice Wood, who had been threatened with both rape and summary execution? As well, the threat by the Montie Three to execute Justice Nasiru Sulemana Gbadegbe, if the Supreme Court decision in the Ramadan-Nimako cause célèbre did not favor the Osei-chaired EC and by extension the Mahama regime?

What is even more flabbergasting is the fact that several critics resident abroad, largely here in the United States, Canada and Britain, some of them with advanced law degrees, have weighed in on the side of the Montie Three by vacuously and scandalously arguing that the sort of inflammatory and hateful language used on the airwaves by the Montie Three is fully protected by all constitutional democracies.

I wish one or two of these “devil’s advocates” could storm the studios of one of the major media networks and threaten to liquidate any members of the U.S. Supreme Court and see what happens.

Mr. Adams also claims that the Montie Three thugs had exhibited remorse for their criminal behavior and so ought to have been let off the hook.

(See “I Am Angrier Over Conviction of Montie 3 – Kofi Adams” Modernghana.com 7/28/16).

He may do us and himself great good by pointing to any article in Ghana’s 1992 Republican Constitution which states that the exhibition of remorse by a criminal convict is tantamount to having served a prison sentence or having made up for criminal conduct of the highest order.