Supreme Court Verdict: Violence Will Lead Politicians To ICC

By Kofi Thompson

When all they are doing, is said to amount to merely playing politics, there is nothing more despicable than clever people seeking to subvert the will of the people, by clothing themselves with high-sounding principle - to make their sinister enterprise appear noble and respectable to decent people.


The question is: What moral right do those extremist politicians (from across the spectrum) threatening to take our nation over the precipice have, to risk the peace and stability of Ghana, in pursuit of naked and selfish ambition - threatening the future and collective well-being of millions of families, whose only prayer is that God grants their nation's political class the wisdom never to destroy Ghana: by allowing it to descend into violence and chaos?


Today, there are concerned patriots who insist that our nation is being held to ransom by hypocrites playing politics to feed their massive egos - and secretly dreaming of sending their personal net worth into the stratosphere: at ordinary Ghanaians' expense.


They accuse those hypocrites of glibly mouthing noble phrases and empty platitudes, which they lack the moral-fibre to justify using, as the justification for their unreasonableness - in seeking power through means other than the ballot-box: exploiting legal technicalities to attempt a power-grab by stealth, after glaringly losing a free and fair election.


Perhaps those uncharitable critics might be a tad unfair - but their opinions are out there in the open nonetheless.

Clearly, judging from the results of their policies whiles in office - since the promulgation of the 1992 constitution - many politicians seek power not to bring about rule by saints.


Otherwise, why, during the election campaign for the December 2012 elections, did we never once hear leading members of the two main parties, the National Democratic Congress (NDC) and the New Patriotic Party (NPP), state unambiguously that they would publicly publish their assets as well as that of their spouses, before assuming office and at their tenures' end?


And why did both parties not swiftly follow the example of Paa Kwesi Nduom's Progressive Peoples Party - and publicly publish the sources of their parties' campaign funds for the December 2012 presidential and parliamentary elections, too?


Why did both main parties also never once breathe a word about reforming many aspects of the public-purse-draining entitlement culture of our educated urban elites - such as the daylight robbery that the payment of obscene sums in compensation packages (including Arabian-oil-Sheik-type perks) to the boards and top management of so many public entities, represents, I ask?


Are the cynics in our midst not therefore right, in asserting that the plain truth is that nothing much in Ghana would have changed, had the results of the December 2012 presidential election gone in favour of the candidate of the main opposition party the NPP?

Would we not in all probability have ended up being given the usual excuses by their new administration too that the previous regime had destroyed the economic prospects of Ghana - and that it would take at least a decade to clear up the mess their opponents had left behind: just the exact length of time the party's presidential candidate had once said it would take to transform Ghana economically?


So why burn Ghana because this time round too the NPP's candidate did not win an election that many independent observers acclaim for its fairness and for being free? And, after all, could he too not be third time lucky like the late President Mills was in the end, when he finally won in December 2008?


Well, we all know that it is not ordinary people who will resort to violence at the behest of ruthless paymasters to destabalise Ghana after the Supreme Court eventually delivers its judgement.


Those who will carry out acts of violence around the country, will be the armies of mostly conscienceless self-seekers, who do not know the meaning of the phrase "sacrifice for the common-weal" - the confounded foot soldiers of political parties: each with a secret personal agenda to rip Ghana off successfully, with their paymasters obligingly looking the other way.


So let no politician who will direct and coordinate foot soldiers to go on the rampage - when the Supreme Court announces its decision after the hearing of the election petition by the NPP's presidential candidate challenging the result of the December 2012 election is concluded - think for one moment that decent-minded Ghanaian nationalists will sit unconcerned, and allow them to escape appearing on the radar of the International Criminal Court (ICC), for the crimes against humanity, which lighting the flames of widespread conflict in Ghana will amount to.

The ICC awaits all politicians in Ghana planning violence, who when the Supreme Court announces its verdict, intend to unleash those blinkered myrmidon-types - whose idea of democracy is a mental outlook that makes them say in response to every wrongdoing by political parties and politicians: "My-party-my-tribe-right-or-wrong" - to cause mayhem in our dear nation.


With respect, no politician - whichever political party he or she belongs to - will be allowed to set Ghana ablaze and get away scot-free - without facing the ICC's prosecutors and appearing before its judges at The Hague.


No Ghanaian politician's personal ambition to be president - be it President Mahama's, Nana Addo Danquah Akufo-Addo's, Paa Kwesi Nduom's or the feisty Madam Akua Donkor's - is worth destroying Ghana for. Period.


For their information, the days of impunity in Africa, amongst the continent's politicians, are long gone.


Is Liberia's former leader Charles Taylor not living proof of that reality - incarcerated as he is in his UN jail cell in The Hague: despite once feeling he was a Master of the Universe and invincible? That is why none of Ghana's politicians who is sane must ever tempt fate. A word to the wise...

Email: peakofi.thompson@gmail.com.