President Mahama Was Already Dead, Mr. Hormena!

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

Garden City, New York

July 29, 2015

E-mail: okoampaahoofe@optimum.net

Whoever Justice Francis Obiri is, the judge who sentenced 36-year-old Mr. Charles Antwi to 10 years' imprisonment for attempting to assassinate an absent President John Dramani Mahama at the Ringway Gospel Assemblies of God Church did not acquit himself creditably, both as a benchman and a Ghanaian citizen. Justice Obiri has made a laughing stock of the Ghanaian judiciary, which was already reeling from the damning after-effects of the 2012 Presidential Election Petition, before the international community (See "NPP Behind Mahama's Assassination Plot - NDC Chairman" Citifmonline.com/ Ghanaweb.com 7/30/15). We shall focus on his rather ludicrous and lame assertion that the Dadiesoaba, Brong-Ahafo, native was fully in control of his mental faculties when the criminal convict allegedly confessed in open court to his assassination attempt charges in another column.

For now, I just wanted us to glancingly have a dig, a little laugh, at the Lower Manya-Krobo National Democratic Congress' district or constituency chairman who has, reportedly, claimed outrageously that operatives of the main opposition New Patriotic Party (NPP) were behind the alleged assassination attempt on President Mahama. We are told that this small-minded local NDC chieftain goes by the name of David Walter Hormena. We don't know his age or the frame of mind in which he was, when Mr. Hormena made the claim attributed to him. What we know, however, is that anybody who critically examines the contents of their campaign platform, and manifesto, and their actual performance record would be hard put to conclude that it is the three-time presidential candidate of the New Patriotic Party who is the more "power hungry" of the two foremost protagonists of mainstream Ghanaian politics.

Mr. Hormena would do himself and the rest of his fellow Ghanaians great good by explaining, for example, why three years after the "mysterious" death of President John Evans Atta-Mills, his former arch-lieutenant has yet to directly and officially tell the nation and the world the exact nature or the cause of death of his former boss. We must also not forget the fact that Mr. Mahama's gut reaction in the wake of the announcement of the passing of President Mills was to publicly exult in his new "windfall" political fortune, as well as publicly celebrate what the Bole-Bamboi native then claimed to be "God in His" inscrutable "wisdom" having auspiciously shoved his boss and now predecessor out of the way.

The sometime Rawlings Communications Minister would proceed to gloat over the fact that he was the first Ghanaian premier to have been born after the country's reassertion of her sovereignty from British colonial imperialism. Now let Mr. Hormena look Ghanaians straight in the eye and tell us whether the foregoing are the words of a mournful non-power-hungry politician. We shall skip the $172 million aircraft-purchase scam question for further discussion in another column. For now, let it suffice to observe tangentially that it is rather lunatic for the Lower Manya-Krobo NDC apparatchik to predicate his assessment of the mental state of Mr. Charles Antwi on his personal belief, and not on the expert diagnosis of a trained and board-certified psychiatrist.

Even as NPP Deputy General-Secretary Nana Obiri-Boahen riposted in response to Mr. Hormena, a man who reasons like the Manya-Krobo card-box pontiff ought to be committed to a mental asylum. Nana Obiri-Boahen also pointedly and aptly added that the only difference between Mr. Antwi and Mr. Hormena was the fact that the latter was freely walking the streets of Ghana and spewing his toxic paralogia, while the former was being savagely and scandalously punished for being clinically insane. Indeed, as I have routinely maintained all along, if Mr. Hormena has any forensically sustainable evidence pointing to Mr. Antwi's having been recruited by any operatives of the New Patriotic Party, by all means, let him produce the same before a legitimately constituted court of the land or seek psychiatric examination.

To be certain, what Mr. Hormena needs to worry himself silly about is the unusually swift manner in which Justice Obiri and the government's lawyers arrived at their verdict and the rather harsh sentencing of Mr.Antwi, whose own birth mother has publicly attested to the fact of her son's being in dire need of psychiatric treatment. Let's face it: Who looks more like s/he has something to hide from the Ghanaian public, the judge and the prosecutors who horridly rushed Mr. Antwi through the judicial process, long before full details of the case had been thoroughly investigated, or those pushing for normal judicial protocol to be rigidly and meticulously followed? Let the dear reader decide for her-/himself.

At any rate, as far as his political fortunes go, President Mahama was already dead before Charles Antwi entered the Ringway Gospel Assemblies of God Church looking to put the poor and prematurely aged man out of his misery with a locally made double-barrel handgun of dubious efficacy. Then also, what makes Mr. Hormena, the Lower Manya-Krobo NDC windbag, presume NPP operatives to be so cash-famished as to hand Mr. Antwi a "Tiaborofre" pistol to go after President Mahama? Come on, put on your thinking cap, Mr. Hormena, if you have one!

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