President Mahama, this is illegal and unacceptable

I have forgotten who it was that recently insisted that President John Dramani Mahama was the avatar of Ghana’s first postcolonial dictator, President Kwame Nkrumah. At first, I thought it was a rather tawdry attempt by the speaker / critic to provoke controversy and debate from the leaders of the rump-Convention People’s Party (r-CPP) and the general Ghanaian public at large. However, increasingly, it is becoming clear that the Chief Resident of the Flagstaff House strikingly exhibits the same dictatorial tendencies as the man he was being described as bearing a spitting political image of, administratively speaking, that it. In just these past two months, the Vice-Presidential Candidate of the country’s main opposition New Patriotic Party (NPP), Dr. Mahamudu Bawumia, has been prevented from speaking at several taxpayer-supported institutions around the country.

The most hostile region on the itinerary of the former Deputy-Governor of the Bank of Ghana has, predictably, been the Volta Region, where one deeply embarrassed traditional ruler was forced to come public to advise some of his fellow chieftains to put an immediate stop to such unhealthy partisan hostility. In the latest of such incidents, widely alleged to have been engineered by President John Dramani Mahama, the New Patriotic Party’s Vice-Presidential Candidate was prevented from speaking to students at the University of Mines and Technology (UMAT) at Tarkwa, in the Western Region. The Oxbridge- and Simon Fraser-schooled Alhaji Bawumia had been afforded an express invitation by the leaders of UMAT’s Students’ Representative Council (SRC) to address the entire student body with the official approval of the institutional authorities, only to have the said invitation summarily withdrawn upon the arrival of the distinguished guest-speaker on the campus, on the dubious grounds that there had been a procedural blunder in the process by which Dr. Bawumia’s invitation was approved (See “UMAT ‘Stops’ Bawumia from Addressing Students” Citifmonline.com / Ghanaweb.com 4/4/16).

In most functional and civilized democracies, the routine practice is to have a leader of one of the major political parties address the student body, followed closely by a balanced invitation to a leader of the other major party within a legally stipulated or acceptable period of time. This is to ensure that the campus community members would be afforded an objective view of the country’s political culture, so as to healthily inform them to make meaningful decisions on their choice of leadership in the polling booth. What, unfortunately, we see here is a dastardly attempt by some key elements of the ruling National Democratic Congress (NDC) to illegitimately hog organized and enlightened public spaces in the lead-up to Election 2016. Very likely, the decision to prevent Dr. Bawumia from addressing the UMAT students originated from the office of President Mahama via the headquarters of the Ministry of Education; which further means that it was very likely orchestrated with the active connivance and/or complicity of Mr. Samuel Okudzeto-Ablakwa, the Deputy Education Minister in charge of Tertiary Education, and the latter’s immediate boss, Prof. Naana Opoku-Agyeman, the former Vice-Chancellor of Cape Coast University.

Whatever the truth and reality of the situation may be, if it happens that a leading member of the ruling National Democratic Congress has, in fact, been permitted to address the UMAT campus community within the last three or four months, for example, the UMAT students’ Representative Council’s executive members can sue in court for access to discursive political balance. As long as the University of Mines and Technology is a publicly owned and supported institution, and not the corporate and private property of the National Democratic Congress, the NDC politicians have absolutely no right, whatsoever, to dictate the terms and policy of who gets to be invited to the UMAT campus to address the latter community. The leaders of the New Patriotic Party must not facilely bow to this politically and morally regressive abuse of the power of incumbency.

As long as the New Patriotic Party leaders are willing to tolerate this flagrant abuse of power by the Mahama Posse, there will be no end in sight to the level of how lowdown and dirty these constitutionally indemnified felons could go. We must also promptly take this opportunity to express our gratitude to the management of the Tarkwa Catholic Secretariat who opportunely, graciously and wisely stepped in to provide Dr. Bawumia with a delectable alternative forum for his address. I am proud to call myself a Catholic-educated Ghanaian-born journalist and educator.

By the way, what I nearly forgot to add is the fact that the continuous and consistent denial of public spaces to the leaders of the NPP by the Mahama-led NDC government, strikingly recalls President Nkrumah’s edict peremptorily prohibiting the Danquah-led main opposition United Party (UP) from the purchase of advertising time from the state-owned Ghana Broadcasting Corporation (GBC). We must, however, quickly add that Dr. Danquah, who had by then effectively withdrawn from active political engagement, at least officially since 1954, had been forced from retirement to lead the United Party during the 1960 presidential election because Dr. K. A. Busia, the bona fide UP leader, threatened with imminent physical liquidation by President Nkrumah, had fled into a European exile. In short, Danquah’s move had been singularly aimed at preventing Ghana from being “democratically” declared a one-party state by Mr. Nkrumah.

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