Opinion: Does Rawlings Know What “Due Process” Means? – By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.

Ghana’s former president Jerry John Rawlings

If his objective is either to intimidate our national security operatives who are holding the Deputy General-Secretary of the main opposition National Democratic Congress (NDC) in custody, or to influence judicial proceedings, former President Jerry John Rawlings is highly unlikely to succeed (See “Koku’s Arrest: Let Due Process Prevail – Rawlings” Classfmonline.com / Ghanaweb.com 3/29/18). He is highly unlikely to succeed because Mr. Rawlings is clearly at the heart of the artificially manufactured controversy surrounding the signing of the Enhanced Military and Security Cooperation Agreement (EMSCA) between Ghana and the United States.

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As has already been extensively noted in this column and a legion of others, a strikingly identical treaty like EMSCA was signed between the John Dramani Mahama-led regime of the National Democratic Congress and the United States in 2015. That pact, which ought to have been signed by the extant Defense Minister was instead signed by Ms. Hanna Tetteh, the Minister of Foreign Affairs at the time. Gen. James Vechery signed the compact on behalf of the United States’ West Africa Military Command. Gen. Vechery himself belongs to the United States’ Air Force. The agreement was never brought to the attention of Ghana’s Parliament, as required by the country’s 1992 Republican Constitution. It was not until the Americans recently approached the Akufo-Addo-led government of the New Patriotic Party (NPP), that it came to light that former President Mahama and his then-Foreign Affairs Minister had deliberately shelved the EMSCA pact or treasonably shredded Ghana’s copy of the agreement.

Now, what is significant to point out here is that since it came to light that former President Mahama and Ms. Tetteh had willfully and criminally conducted a patent illegality that was in diametric contravention of the Sovereignty of Ghana, Chairman Rawlings has not made any public statement regarding the fact that his own former Communications Minister had criminally compromised the Sovereignty of Ghana. The flagrant violation of Ghana’s Sovereignty inheres in criminal secrecy of the 2015 EMSCA compact. Instead, Chairman Rawlings chose to weigh in on the side of the NDC hoodlum pack, who rather find it more convenient and politically expedient to scapegoat President Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo, rather than squarely and fairly and roundly condemning his former mentee for setting such a virulently negative precedent that effectively hogtied the members of the Akufo-Addo government. Maybe the Mahama Posse wanted some help with rigging Election 2016 that was flatly denied them by the Americans, which is why they have been vehemently protesting against EMSCA.

You may vividly recall, dear reader, that in the leadup to the 2016 election, then-President Mahama positioned a battalion of soldiers in Nana Akufo-Addo’s home province of the Eastern Region. The purpose and motive of such massing up of soldiers in perhaps the most peaceful of the country’s ten regions was quite obvious. Anyway, in reality, it was Mr. Rawlings who set the precedent that “effectively” compromised the Sovereignty of Ghana, as the operatives of his own party cynically prefer to cast it, by signing the first EMSCA pact with the United States in 1998. We must also quickly and emphatically point out that whatever purported limitations, in terms of granting the United States’ Military access to Ghana’s Military and Security Installations that appeared in the first Ghana-US Military pact signed by then-President Rawlings, do not appear in the 2015 document that was signed by then-President Mahama and then-Foreign Affairs Minister, Ms. Hanna Tetteh.

It is the purported lack of limitations of access to our security facilities and installations that operatives, members and supporters of the National Democratic Congress perceive to be tantamount to the flagrant compromising of Ghana’s Sovereignty. If the preceding observations have validity, then, clearly, it was the key operatives of the erstwhile Mahama-led government of the National Democratic Congress that first compromised Ghana’s Sovereignty. And so, if one may logically ask: Why are the leaders of the National Democratic Congress flatly refusing to accept primal or original responsibility – or The Original Sin – for having criminally compromised the Sovereignty and integrity of the Ghanaian people?

In the Anyidoho Case, which clearly has absolutely no relationship, whatsoever, to the parliamentary ratification of the EMSCA pact, although it is being used as a ruse, the Deputy General-Secretary of the party of which Chairman Rawlings is the official Founding-Father, Mr. Koku Anyidoho, categorically and indisputably calls for “a civilian social revolution” and bloodshed like that which immediately preceded the Napoleonic Revolution in France in 1789. We know it is both an incitement of hatred against both the person of President Akufo-Addo and the latter’s legitimately and democratically elected New Patriotic Party government. That was precisely how the Rwanda Genocide of the 1990s was provoked. Our national security operatives do not need any further forensically actionable evidence to rigorously prosecute Mr. Anyidoho. They need not to have discovered or uncovered any munitions in this hate monger’s residence. The guns and bullets are already stockpiled in the country. This was done in the leadup to the 2016 general elections, when several truckloads of munitions were widely reported to have been intercepted or impounded by Ghanaian Border Guards at Aflao, the main southeastern entry checkpoint with Togo.

*Visit my blog at: kwameokoampaahoofe.wordpress.com  Ghanaffairs

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