Police "Protection" for What?

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

The actual constitutional head of the Ghana Police Service - it used to be called the Ghana Police Force (GPF) - is the extant Vice-President of the Republic of Ghana. In this instance, that personality is Mr. Kwesi Bekoe Amissah-Arthur, the arch-lieutenant to President John Dramani Mahama and former Governor of the Bank of Ghana. And so I really don't see the wisdom of anybody among the executive ranks of the main opposition New Patriotic Party (NPP) petitioning the Inspector General of the Ghana Police Service (IGP) for armed police personnel to protect Ms. Gloria Akuffo, the prominent member of the NPP-Legal Team, and Mr. Philip Addison, lead counsel for the Akufo-Addo/NPP petitioners challenging the electoral mandate of Mr. Mahama (See "NPP Demands Police Protection for Akuffo, Addison" Radioxyzonline.com/Ghanaweb.com 5/23/13).

And here may be recalled the fact that the preceding request is squarely based on the alleged appearance at the premises of Nana Akufo-Addo's high-end legal practice - Akufo-Addo, Prempeh & Co. - of "two macho men on a motorbike... demanding to know the residential address of Gloria Akufo." Couple the foregoing with two burglary incidents within the past six months, during which several laptop computers were squirelled away by some unknown intruders out of the office of Ms. Akuffo, and an eerily vivid picture of motives begins to emerge.

Naturally, therefore, both incidents have plausibly been linked to dastardly attempts by partisans of the ruling National Democratic Congress to gain access to information pertaining to the Akufo-Addo/NPP petition, with the obvious intent of destroying such evidence as may forensically boost the case of the petitioners, to wit, that Election 2012 was collusively rigged by Messrs. Afari-Gyan and Mahama in favor of the latter.

As of this writing (5/24/13), it is not known who these "macho men on a motorbike" are; but one dearly hopes that Mr. Alex Quainoo, to whom these criminal suspects had been referred on the premises of the Akufo-Addo legal practice, after their motive and/or mission had been ascertained, had taken adequate notes on the appearance (demeanor) and identity of these "macho men," in order to enable a vigorous search by the GPS to track them down and possibly subject them to the necessary legal sanctions.

I must quickly point out, at least in passing, that I am not holding my breath - knowing what I have come to know about the invariably fair-weather or political weather-vane orientation of the Ghana police establishment in general. Significantly also, we are informed that exactly two days following the mysterious appearance of the two macho men on a motorbike at the legal practice of Nana Akufo-Addo, Ms. Akuffo's office was burglarized, with at least two laptop computers being spirited away.

Now, if the foregoing allegation, or report, has validity - and there is absolutely no reason to impugn the same - then the aforesaid macho men may definitely be up to something sinister and well verging on the outrightly fatal. But whether a highly politicized police organization such as Ghana's can be trusted to provide the kind of security protection ordinarily associated with a first-rate professional police establishment is definitely moot. We sincerely hope to the high heavens that we are wrong on this one.

For me, personally,though, reporting and discussing this subject has more to do with the need for the international community to understand and fully appreciate what passes for Ghanaian democracy, these days, under the Mahama-led government of the so-called National Democratic Congress, a patently "revolutionary" political organization with a history that is more akin to that of Al-Qaeda than a modern, postcolonial political party. That the NDC has the singular notoriety of systematically orchestrating the abduction and Mafia-style execution of high court judges, ought not to be lost sight of by the global community.

Indeed, this is the highly charged political milieu under which the Atuguba-presided panel of Supreme Court jurists are hearing the Akufo-Addo petition. And it is also the primary reason why earlier on, I had called for an independent panel of non-Ghanaian African jurists of unimpeachable repute to preside over the case.

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

Department of English

Nassau Community College of SUNY

Garden City, New York

May 24, 2013

E-mail: okoampaahoofe@optimum.net.

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