NDC Arrogance Will Not Resolve Dagbon Crisis

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

On April 9, 2011, Citifmonline.com reported the arrival of Vice-President John Dramani Mahama at the Manhyia Palace of the Asantehene, Otumfuo Osei-Tutu II. The Vice-President, who was reportedly accompanied by the Interior Minister, Dr. Benjamin Kumbuor, and National Security Advisor Brig.-Gen. Joseph Nunoo-Mensah, had the onerous mission of getting the Asantehene to restart the abruptly severed talks between the Andani and Abudu gates of the Dagbon royal family.

And on the preceding score may be vividly recalled the fact that Otumfuo Osei-Tutu, together with two other Northern Regional chieftains constituting a Committee of Eminent Chiefs (CEC), was in the quite grueling process of resolving the apocalyptic family feud that culminated in the murder of Ya-Na Yakubu Andani II, the Supreme Overlord of the Dagomba State, when some members of the Dagbon royal family claiming to represent the Abudu Gate abruptly announced their loss of confidence in the Asantehene and the two other northern chieftains (See “Mills Requests Asantehene to Resume Abudu-Andani Talks” Ghanaweb.com 4/10/11).

On April 9, Vice-President Mahama reportedly told the Asantehene that the Abudu claimants who summarily and abruptly caused the severance of the Otumfuo-led peace-talks were, after all, “not speaking on behalf of the entire Abudu Royal Gate, which has since apologized to the eminent chiefs.” We hope that the latest decision of the Abudu Gate to return to the peace-table with their Andani kinsmen (and women, of course!) is meant with all the seriousness that this unnecessarily drawn-out conflict deserves, both in the interest of national security and the development of the Dagomba State as well.

Paradoxically, however, it seems that the Mills-Mahama-led government of the National Democratic Congress (NDC) has yet to fully appreciate the difference and meaning between justice and peace, particularly regarding which of the latter two ingredients requires greater national attention. Thus on March 31, 2011, the Deputy Information Minister, Mr. Samuel Okudzeto-Ablakwa, predictably and vacuously, released a press statement in which the government’s most vocal propagandist facilely presumed to impugn the integrity of the judicial system as follows: “It cannot be the case that there was nobody responsible for the murder of the late king, and there must be justice to ensure that the perpetrators are brought to book” (See “Gov’t to Appeal Ya-Na Ruling” MyJoyOnline.com 3/31/11).

What was even more annoying was Mr. Okudzeto-Ablakwa’s bold-faced mendacity to the damnable effect that, indeed, the “Government [of the National Democratic Congress had] proceeded to court after months of painstaking and fresh investigations that brought revealing evidence for the prosecution of the suspects. And it is [the] government’s view that the case should have gone for full trial.”

If, indeed, as Mr. Okudzeto-Ablakwa pontifically claims, the Mills-Mahama government “brought revealing evidence for the prosecution of the suspects,” then, to be certain, even as the presiding judge, Justice E. K. Ayebi, made it poignantly and incontrovertibly clear in his closing remarks, such forensic evidence as Mr. Okudzeto-Ablakwa claims the Attorney-General’s to have been in possession of never quite made it into the courthouse, let alone Justice Ayebi’s courtroom! For as the public was to shortly learn in the wake of the acquittal of all 15 suspects charged with the murder of Ya-Na Yakubu Andani II, Attorney-General Martin Amidu had simply submitted the findings of the Kufuor-minted Wuaku Commission Report whose credibility the then-opposition National Democratic Congress had vociferously impugned since day one of its publication!

The public would even learn to its horror that among the 15 suspects rounded up for prosecution by the Mills-Mahama government, at least one of them was only six years old when the alleged 2002 murder of Ya-Na Yakubu Andani II occurred! And on the latter score, it eerily becomes glaring that what the Mills-Mahama government takes for justice, by way of an objective interpretation, is to simply round up vulnerable and ready scapegoats from the Abudu Gate of the Dagbon royal family for the appeasement of their cousins of the Andani Gate and, of course, the scoring of cheap political points on the part of the ruling National Democratic Congress.

It is also rather curious for the fire-spitting and brimstone-swearing likes of Messrs. Atta-Mills, Mahama and Okudzeto-Ablakwa to be insisting on bringing justice to the alleged killers of Ya-Na Yakubu Andani II, without also informing the Ghanaian public of what kind of judicial recompense these same gentlemen intend to visit on the murderers of the 40, or so, other courtiers who brutally perished with the Ya-Na. Or are Ghanaians being simply made to understand that only the killers of the Ya-Na deserve to be brought to justice, while all the other killers – alleged to belong to both the Andani and Abudu gates – can choose to take an indefinite hike abroad?

*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 us a Governing Board Member of the Accra-based Danquah Institute (DI) and the author, most recently, of “The Obama Serenades” (Lulu.com, 2011). E-mail: okoampaahoofe@optimum.net.

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