By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.
Garden City, New York
Sept. 11, 2015
E-mail: okoampaahoofe@optimum.net
I have said this before and hereby repeat the same: that if Ghana’s political culture were not so hopelessly decadent, Mr. Paul Afoko would not still be at post and imperiously holding himself out as the democratically elected National Chairman of the New Patriotic Party (NPP). He would have either promptly and honorably resigned, the moment it became publicly clear that he was in some way connected to the brutal acid-dousing assassination of Mr. Adams Mahama, or he would have been promptly asked by the operatives of the party’s Disciplinary Committee to stand down until judicial proceedings were done vis-a-vis the capital act of barbarous criminality involving his younger brother, Mr. Gregory Afoko, and the life of the late Upper-East’s Regional Chairman of the New Patriotic Party.
But sadly, as matters have turned out, Mr. Afoko is not very much a man possessed of any remarkable sense of personal integrity. And the longer he continues to hold himself out as the administrative visage of Ghana’s largest party, the more serious damage he does to the image and reputation of the party established in the hallowed names and spirits of Messrs. Joseph Boakye-Danquah, Kofi Abrefa Busia and S. D. Dombo. It is incontrovertibly clear that Mr. Afoko has something to do with the assassination of the former NPP’s Regional Chairman of the Upper-East, because in the immediate media reportage of the fatal acid-dousing of Mr. Mahama, the National Chairman of the NPP besieged the airwaves and vehemently denied that his 50-year-old brother, Gregory, who, reportedly, has an extensive criminal record, having also served a remarkable prison term, had anything to do with this barbaric incident.
We must also quickly point out that seated at his giant office desk in Accra, at his party’s Kokomlemle headquarters, elder brother Paul was at least 400 miles removed from the scene of the crime. However, not only would the NPP’s National Chairman spiritedly attempt to clear his younger brother, the prime suspect, of any wrongdoing, he would even attempt to cop an alibi for Mr. Gregory Afoko. He would also curiously claim that the latter had been fast asleep at the time of the incident and, even more importantly, that the motorbike by which his kid brother could have committed the crime had been discovered to be ice-cold in the Afoko home in Bolgatanga by police investigators.
Well, no sooner had elder brother Paul put the preceding narrative into the public domain than everything began to swiftly unravel, clearly pointing to the fact that, indeed, even as the dying man is reported to have told police investigators, Mr. Gregory Afoko was the criminal mastermind of the attack. Well, I have been told by an intimate first-cousin of mine who spent some 40 years in the Ghana Police Service (GPS), having risen through the ranks from Constable to Assistant Superintendent of Police (ASP), that if, indeed, a dying Mr. Mahama had revealed the identity of his assailants prior to his death, then such first-hand account of the incident is contradiction-proof.
In other words, such testimony cannot be lightly dismissed as mere hearsay. It is the virtual equivalent of DNA evidence. Some who are blindly supportive of Mr. Paul Afoko, and there are quite a few of them, point to the fact that the Mahama murder case is still in court as adequate and/or convincing proof of the need for the discerning public to hold off on any incriminating judgment and/or opinions against a man who has not been charged with any crime or wrongdoing. Well, I firmly believe that New Patriotic Party ought to establish a moral code of ethical behavior that is discrete and far higher than the largely clinical set of standards established and mechanically followed by the courts. In brief, the National Chairman of the New Patriotic Party does not have to be brought up on criminal charges before anybody at the top hierarchy of the party can fully recognize the fact that Mr. Paul Afroko’s all-too-mischievous attempt to concoct an alibi for his brother flagrantly violates the rules of ethical conduct used in measuring the integrity of highly positioned leaders like the NPP’s National Chairman.
Those who claim that the suspension or dismissal of Mr. Afoko would do any harm to the interests of the party, may well be moles planted therein by the key operatives of the ruling National Democratic Congress.
