What Has "Diplomatic Passport" Got To Do With Truth?

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

Garden City, New York

August 17, 2014

E-mail: okoampaahoofe@optimum.net

One thing is crystal clear - the major players of the Mahama-led National Democratic Congress (NDC) know fully well (and guiltily so) that they are a complete flop. They are irredeemable failures. Consequently, they have resorted to either playing the absurdly infantile game of retroactive tit-for-tat or what has become widely known as the politics of equalization. Under this brand of politics, the Mahama government operatives prefer to impudently justify policy blunders, willful or inadvertent, by baldly claiming that their political opponents did the exact same thing when they were vested with the electoral mandate.

Or they try to impugn the integrity of their critics by claiming that these critics are just livid with envy, jealousy or sour grapes. The latter brand of political cheap shot was what one of the NDC's so-called communicators, Mr. Sam George, attempted to use in countering Pastor Mensa Otabil's forthright declaration of Ghana under President John Dramani Mahama as "a sinking ship." According to Mr. George, during the tenure of President John Evans Atta-Mills, late, the Founder and General Overseer of the International Central Gospel Church had petitioned the National Democratic Congress government for a diplomatic passport and been promptly rebuffed, thus the decision by Dr. Otabil to caustically dress down President Mahama (See "Otabil 'Never Requested' Diplomatic Passport from Mills" Starrfmonline.com / Ghanaweb.com 8/17/14).

In rhetorical argumentation, what Mr. George brought up is a logical fallacy; it is called the Fallacy of Red-Herring. There is an elaborate history behind this terminology which the objective of this column does not permit me to delve into, if only because it would counter-productively achieve the unintended result of discursive distraction or side-tracking. Mr. George's allegation is a logical fallacy because it has absolutely no bearing on whether or not Pastor Otabil is right on target in his characterization of President Mahama's Ghana as "a sinking ship." This analogy, of course, is a figurative or metaphorical capsualization of the bleak state of the country's economy.

In other words, Mr. George's response to Pastor Otabil ought to have come in the form of an objective analysis of the country's economy and the drawing of a dispassionate conclusion indicating the fact that Dr. Otabil was, somehow, grossly misreading the state of the nation's economy when he accused President Mahama of being the inept captain of a sinking ship. Now whether, indeed, Pastor Otabil requested of the late President Atta-Mills to be afforded a diplomatic passport and was promptly refused is decidedly beside the point. What Mr. George, now that he has opened the proverbial can of worms, ought to be telling Ghanaians is the process by which non-government operatives were afforded diplomatic passports, which may well have prompted Pastor Otabil to demand to have one.

There ought to have been some sort of precedence by which the leader of the International Central Gospel Church could have made the alleged request. And also, if there existed any such procedure, precisely what qualified any non-official or non-government working private Ghanaian citizen to obtain a diplomatic passport? And also, who were some of the Ghanaian citizens in the same line of work as Dr. Otabil who had been issued diplomatic passports by the erstwhile Mills-Mahama government?

You see, what the NDC's Mr. Sam George is really saying here is that the Mills-Mahama government was possessed of a corrupt patronage sub-culture of which, somehow, a willing participant by the name of Dr. Mensa Otabil was refused admission and participation. Now, Mr. George also needs to offer us evidentiary proof of his allegation or promptly apologize for gratuitously defaming and impugning the moral and professional integrity of the ICGC founder and leader.

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