Opinion
The duly suspended chairman of Ghana’s main opposition New Patriotic Party (NPP) is a very curious creature, if only because Mr. Paul A. Afoko appears to believe that he has every right to grossly insult the intelligence of reasonably enlightened Ghanaians (See “Mahama’s Murder: My Brother Is Innocent – Afoko” Starrfmonline.com / Ghanaweb.com 2/24/16).
The fact of the matter is that the elder brother of the man accused of masterminding the brutal and savage assassination of Mr. Adams Mahama, the former Upper-East Regional Chairman of the New Patriotic Party, has absolutely no credibility whatsoever.
For starters, in the wake of the acid-dousing assassination of Mr. Mahama last year, Chairman Afoko swarmed the airwaves and vehemently declared that his younger brother, Mr. Gregory Afoko, was totally innocent and had not even been on the scene of the crime at the patently ungodly hour during which Mr. Mahama had reportedly been fatally assaulted.
Police investigators would shortly reveal that, indeed, contrary to what Chairman Afoko would have the rest of the world believe, the younger Mr. Afoko had, indeed, callously and unconscionably carried out the attack with the unreserved complicity of some two others, namely, Messrs. Issah Musah and Asabke Alangdi.
As of this writing, Mr. Alangdi, together with his wife, was still reported to be on the run. Police investigators have reportedly revealed that it was an Afoko partisan who likely facilitated the timely escape of the Alangdis, who had left behind their newly born baby. At the time of Mr. Mahama’s fatal assault, Chairman Afoko had reportedly claimed that the motorbike by which his brother would have committed the crime was found by police investigators to have been ice-cold at the Afoko home, with the prime suspect being fast asleep. It would shortly pan out that none of the alibis concocted by Chairman Afoko who, by the way, was located some 500 miles away in Accra when the brutal murder of Mr. Mahama took place, had passed muster or scrutiny.
Once again, we need to significantly highlight the fact that Mr. Gregory Afoko is a well-known criminal convict who reportedly spent considerable time in the slammer. He was also known to have constituted a vigilante group that he used to protect the private political interests of Chairman Afoko in the Upper-East’s capital of Bolgatanga.
Even more importantly ought to be stressed the fact that reliable sources indicated that the dying Mr. Mahama had categorically named his assailants and wondered whether these criminal suspects would ever be brought to justice. We must also pointedly observe that Chairman Afoko has publicly admitted that he and the deceased were on the worst of possible terms.
And, in fact, shortly before his fatal assault, Chairman Afoko and General-Secretary Kwabena Agyei Agyepong had stormed the Bolgatanga headquarters of the New Patriotic Party without any advance notice to Chairman Mahama.
From a widely publicized letter released to the media barely two weeks before his untimely demise, Mr. Mahama vividly recalled how devious and dastardly attempts to tactically sideline Akufo-Addo partisans, on the part of Messrs. Afoko and Agyepong, had culminated in the violent expression of hostilities that had greeted the two presently suspended men at the NPP’s Bolgatanga headquarters.
The presiding judge of the Gregory Afoko murder case, Mr. Koku Worlanyo, has reportedly observed that based on his examination of evidentiary material submitted by the prosecution, there is a “compelling case for the accused to answer at the High Court.”
Chairman Afoko says that Judge Worlanyo may have grossly misread and/or misinterpreted whatever evidence the prosecution presented to the presiding judge, and that his brother Gregory is totally innocent of the charges preferred against him, and that on March 23, when the Accra District Court commences proceedings in the case, he, Chairman Afoko, and defense counsel would eloquently and thoroughly prove beyond any shadow of a doubt that Mr. Gregory had absolutely nothing to do with Mahama’s brutal murder. Well, as the tired old saying goes: Let’s wait and see.
