Mohammed Mumuni, the Kumbungu Member of Parliament (MP), National Democratic Congress (NDC) and spokesman on Legal and Constitutional Affairs, says Rawlings should be dealt with if found to have lied about the government ministers.
“He should be dealt with according to the law,” Mr. Mumuni said in response to a Chronicle question on what should be done to the ex-president, if he is eventually exposed to have libeled the 16 New Patriotic Party (NPP) MPs he Rawlings claimed masterminded the serial killing of women some years ago.
Mr. Mumuni’s was one of varied reactions Chronicle received while polling opinions on Mr. Rawlings’ decline or failure to name the supposed culprits when the Criminal Investigation Department (CID) of the Ghana Police Service paid a visit to him at his residence on Wednesday.
Though asking that his party founder be dealt with without fear or favour, Mumuni was quick to make an additional statement: “I have not come across any section of the law which states that any person who refuses to disclose a piece of information should be tried, apart from the issue of treason.”
The behaviour of the ex-president, (if he is found to have told a lie) cannot be equated with treason, which is the crime of doing something that could cause danger to your country, such as helping its enemies during war.
In the survey, Baffuor Agyemang-Duah, executive director of the Centre for Democratic Development (CDD) felt Rawlings had been obsessed by events.
“The former president is obviously obsessed with getting to the bottom of the truth and that is why he prefers a lie detector.”
But Kwabena Agyapong, press liaison at the presidency, found it “very shocking that the ex-president who stands for probity, transparency and accountability failed to account to the nation.”
Mr. Agyapong further diagnosed the problems of Rawlings saying he is in a “confused state and so giving pre-conditions.”
In the view of Mohammed Mumuni, Rawlings is justified in not naming the culprits because “perhaps he is talking from a background and dissatisfaction he has for the security agencies and the way things have been proceeding. So if he needs certain conditions, they should be granted.”
But the Ghana Police Service expressed profound disappointment with the utterances and conduct of the former president.
A release a deputy inspector general, P. K. Acheampong, signed on Wednesday regretted that Rawlings “makes a fetish of what he calls ‘chemical interrogation’ and also lie detector tests. The police appreciate his ignorance on these matters, since he is not a trained professional on the applications involved in these methods.”
As readers would recall, Rawlings dropped the bombshell while publicly reacting to invitations to appear before the National Reconciliation Commission (NRC) to answer charges of his complicity in extra-judicial killings during the revolutionary era of 1982-1992. The occasion was the 24th anniversary of the June 4 revolution, an insurrection that first brought him to power.
After vowing not to appear before the NRC until it acquired lie detectors and facilities for chemical interrogation, Rawlings accused “16 senior Cabinet ministers of Kufuor’s (NPP) government” of masterminding the killing of the 34 women. Earlier in 2001 he had told an outgoing ambassador that the serial murders had been politically motivated.
To find out whether any other NDC members were privy to the information that the then opposition NPP members were behind the women killings, Chronicle grilled the Kumbungu MP. “I heard rumours which were circulated all over the nation but there were no credible facts in them.”
On how feasible Mr. Rawlings’ demands were, Dr. Agyeman-Duah remarked that because the effectiveness of those detectors are not fool-proof, they cannot provide absolute truth. “Even in America, there have been times the courts have rejected them (detectors) because all kinds of stories were being told.”
The police dismissed the tests as methods that make good and exciting reading only in novels, cartoons and dreamworks but with “very little significance in real, dogged, painstaking investigations. These methods have little or no significance in the prosecutors art of proving a case beyond reasonable doubt in a court of law,” according to deputy IGP Acheampong.
But to the question of whether the lie detector devices must be procured to satisfy Mr. Rawlings’ whims, Kwabena Agyapong had something interesting to say. “I wish, on a personal score, that they should give him the longest of ropes so that he does not have anything to hang on.”
