Lying through their teeth

Expectedly the storm at Nana Akufo Addo’s residence last Sunday morning has evoked varied interpretations and versions.

The airwaves were awash with a cacophony of interventions, one of them from the Police: this unsurprisingly did not include a deserved apology to the people of Ghana for their late response to the convergence upon the façade of the residence of Nana Akufo Addo by hoodlums of the ruling NDC with clear intention to unleash mayhem.

While some of the interventions made sense, others were the usual propaganda pieces; complete balderdash intended only to direct public opinion towards a particular direction.

It is interesting though that the NDC version appears to tie in with Superintendent Cephas Arthur’s, the man whose task it is to whitewash the Ghana Police Service, regardless of the quality of their case.

With close to nothing in terms of public deference, his interventions have of late become sources of ridicule, his premises incommensurate with logic.

In the heat of the confusion triggered by the provocative assembling of NDC elements in front of Nana Akufo Addo’s house, less than a minute’s walk from the Nima Divisional and District Headquarters of the Ghana Police Service, Cephas and his bosses should rather bow their heads in shame and not seek to please politicians through such inappropriate apportioning of blame.

Cephas’ claim that a private security man in the opposition leader’s residence aimed a pistol at the head of the Counter-terrorism Unit’s Commander in front of Nana’s residence made interesting hearing and reading as the case may be. It also shows how some men can sell their conscience for favours.

It broke the heart of many to hear Cephas Arthur seek to make the private security detail in Nana’s house the villains in the act of hooliganism meted out by NDC thugs bused to Nima by somebody who seeks dividend from possible break down of law and order.

PR intervention in the serial caller mode and therefore not couched in subtlety and the fear of God reduces the origin of the lies to unworthiness.

We doubt if a non-NDC person can train his weapon on the head of the Counter-Terrorism without being arrested almost immediately when such action is criminal even without pulling the trigger.

Indeed managing PR in the Ghana Police Service is no mean task for the principled, not so however, for those who can lie through their teeth and not look back.

Many who listened to Cephas could not help juxtapose his performance with Chief Superintendent Kofi Ofori’s when the latter managed the PR Directorate of the law enforcement agency.

While both showed similarities, the former manager was more mature with his lies and his eye-servicing.

So Cephas and his superiors, including their allies in the NDC, did not find anything wrong with thugs of the latter choosing the façade of Nana’s residence as their assembling point on that fateful Sunday? God save this country.

In civilized dispensations where state institutions such as the Police are not at the beck and call of political parties in power, professionalism reigns and citizens can count on non-selective enforcement of the law.