By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.
Garden City, New York
March 23, 2016
E-mail: okoampaahoofe@optimum.net
Mr. Kofi Adams has absolutely no point in suggesting that if the three South African ex-police officers arrested by agents from the Bureau of National Investigations (BNI) were in the country at the invitation of the leaders of the New Patriotic Party (NPP) to train party members and activists in crowd control, then there are quite a remarkable number of retired Ghanaian police officers among the rank-and-file membership of the New Patriotic Party – (See “NPP Has Never Admitted Its Wrongdoings – Kofi Adams” TV3Network.com / Ghanaweb.com 3/23/16).
Maybe somebody old enough with a photographic memory ought to remind the National Organizer of the National Democratic Congress (NDC) that there were universities in Ghana when the founding-patriarch of the NDC, Chairman Jerry John Rawlings, shipped all his four children abroad for tertiary academic and professional training. To be certain, Chairman Rawlings had been shuttering up the then-three major Ghanaian academies so frequently that the viability of these national brain trusts was beginning to be seriously cast in doubt. And yet, today, we have cynical politicians and moral reprobates like Mr. Haruna Iddrisu, the Labor Minister, fanatically and self-righteously championing the cause for the renaming of the University of Development Studies (UDS) after the man who has done more than any postcolonial Ghanaian leader to regress the quality of the country’s educational system.
Then also, somebody ought to ask Mr. Adams why even though there are hundreds of hospitals, health centers and clinics scattered all over the country, nevertheless, Ghanaian politicians from the late President John Evans Atta-Mills to John Dramani Mahama, and even President Rawlings, before these two National Democratic Congress’ leaders, frequently troop to South Africa and the West, in general, for medical treatment whenever they feel themselves to be under the weather.
The fact of the matter is that when it comes to decisions bordering on one’s personal safety and health, one makes choices that the concerned decision-maker feels most comfortable and confident with. In short, nobody can blame the 2016 Presidential Candidate of the main opposition New Patriotic Party, Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo, as well as the latter’s running-mate, Dr.-Alhaji Mahamudu Bawumia, for feeling safer and more confident to have some ex-service personnel of the South African Defense Forces (SADF) flown in to train their security detail. In other words, it is insufferably presumptuous for NDC apparatchiks like Mr. Adams to presume to lecture the leaders of the New Patriotic Party on where to pick and choose professional trainers for their security detail and polling agents.
I also don’t know what he means when the NDC National Organizer asserts that the leaders of the New Patriotic Party never admit of their wrongdoings. What I know for a verifiable fact is that the Rawlings Posse strong-armed the members of our Fourth Republican Constituent Assembly into indemnifying them out of their human foibles, fallibility and deliberate and wanton depravity so as to enable them to avoid facing up to the disciplinary aftermath of the natural principle of social justice.
Indeed, I have said this before and hereby repeat the same – that the arrest, detention and even show-casing trial and prosecution of the three South African ex-security officers will not stop the leaders of the New Patriotic Party from flying into the country the best security personnel and trainers, wherever they can be found, to facilitate the upgrading of the quality of the party’s security apparatus.
Likewise, any dastardly attempt to GITMO-ize these three retired security officers in a devious bid to characteristically “equalizing” for the Mahama cabinet’s morally and civically irresponsible and culpably regressive handling of the case of the Yemeni/Saudi Gitmo Two will be fiercely fought off. “Oh no, we no sit down make them cheat us every day!”
*Visit my blog at: kwameokoampaahoofe.wordpress.com Ghanaffairs
