Baba Jamal’s Forked Tongue and Conscience

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

English Department, SUNY-Nassau

Garden City, New York

August 18, 2016

E-mail: okoampaahoofe@optimum.net

I wasn’t the least bit surprised that Baba Jamal, the National Democratic Congress’ Member of Parliament for Akyem-Akwatia, would sign the presidential petition notebook seeking the immediate release of the Montie Three, and then turn around a couple of weeks later to publicly plead with President John Dramani Mahama to refuse a pardon for Messrs. Salifu Maase (aka Mugabe), Alistair Tairo Nelson and Godwin Ako Gunn (See “Mahama Shouldn’t Pardon Montie 3 – Baba Jamal” Starrfmonline.com / Ghanaweb.com 8/17/16).

For those of our readers who may have so soon forgotten about the man, Mr. Jamal was the Deputy Information Minister who lectured reporters and writers of the Information Services Department about the need to wildly exaggerate the activities of the Mahama-led government of the National Democratic Congress (NDC), if these civil service employees desired to keep their jobs for any considerable amount of time. Back then, the current Deputy Minister for Employment and Labor Relations was widely reported to have told the employees of the Information Services Department that if President Mahama donated a goat to any charitable or civil society organization, they were to report that the President had donated a cow; and if the goat was black in color, they were to describe the same as snow-white.

In other words, Baba Jamal is a personality who woefully lacks the integrity and honesty required of a good leader. In the hot-button matter of the Montie Three who were recently prosecuted, convicted and sentenced to 4 months’ imprisonment for threatening to rape Chief Justice Georgina Theodora Wood, as well as summarily execute at least five other associate justices of the Supreme Court of Ghana, for example, Mr. Jamal now says that he decided to sign the presidential petition notebook in sheer solidarity with his fellow NDC cabinet appointees, and not because he was of the firm belief that Messrs. Maase, Nelson and Gunn did not deserve the disciplinary sanctions meted them by the Supreme Court.

Now, the NDC-MP for Akyem-Akwatia would like to make President Mahama fully aware of the fact that should he make the egregious error of granting a pardon to the Montie Three gang members, in the words of Mr. Sam Okudzeto, he would be presiding over his own political funeral. What Baba Jamal clearly seems to be implying here is that the grossly anti-judicial invectives peddled by the Montie Three, in an unmistakable bid to influencing the Apex Court’s verdict on the integrity of the current National Voters’ Register, had the full backing of the key operatives of the ruling National Democratic Congress, if not, in fact, the entire ministerial panoply of the Mahama government.

What makes Mr. Jamal somewhat of a political standout, at least in the wake of his most recent public pronouncement on the fate of the Montie Three, is the Akyem-Akwatia NDC-MP’s bold, albeit belated, recognition of the fact that the perennial strategic policy of judicial persecution and intimidation, originally hatched by Chairman Jerry John Rawlings, may, after all, not be the healthiest way of effectively advancing postcolonial Ghanaian democracy, much less facilitate the establishment of a stable and peaceful polity.

He does not specifically say it, but it well appears that closely following in the more legally informed footsteps of Nana Ato Dadzie, the former Rawlings Chief-of-Staff, it has gravely dawned on Mr. Jamal that setting the presidency and, in fact, the executive in general, against the judiciary may not be in the best interest of the nation at large, least of all, whatever legacy Mr. Mahama may want Ghanaians to remember him by.

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