Ghanaians have often been accused of possessing acutely short memory capacities. There may be some severe unfairness to such accusation. But there may also be an iota of truth to such often bitter and unmistakably sarcastic edge to this accusation. Those among us who are old enough, including yours truly, may vividly recall that former President John Agyekum-Kufuor spent the first couple of years of his Administration, in the wake of his succession from the recently retired President Jerry John Rawlings, vigorously but seemingly fruitlessly fighting the strangely high incidence of what clearly appeared to be the deliberate and systematically orchestrated serial murders of a targeted group of women in the Achimota section of Accra. The victims were nearly all of them reckoned to be in their forties or early fifties.
I know he vividly remembers this, because the now-President Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo was President Kufuor’s Attorney-General and Minister of Justice at the time. Those who were either not yet born, or were too young to remember may not be able to readily connect the proverbial mnemonic dots, vis-à-vis the fact that what is happening on the national-security front in the country, presently, under the stewardship of Nana Akufo-Addo, coming immediately after 8 years of rank administrative corruption and trying economic times under the tandem tenures of Presidents John Evans Atta-Mills, deceased, and John Dramani Mahama, is strikingly akin to the unusually high-spate of targeted killings that occurred nearly two decades ago.
We must also quickly point out that the most recent wave of antisocial acts of criminality comes immediately after the rancor-charged reign of the National Democratic Congress (NDC). I guess what I am unmistakably trying to get at here is the fact that former President Rawlings’ recent public observation that the targeted killings of our police officers and some other security agents may not be totally accidental, and that the entire bloody and heinous acts of criminality may very well be the masterminds or cranial handiwork of some inveterate political opponents of President Akufo-Addo, may not be wholly off the mark of truth. In other words, what we clearly have here may not be altogether coincidental. And to be certain, Chairman Rawlings may very well be privy to far more intelligence than he is presently letting on. Which, of course, is not in any way, shape or form to imply that he may very well be complicit in the same.
At any rate, the retired strongman turned former democratically elected leader’s most recent verbal joust with Mr. Kennedy Ohene Agyepong, the tough-talking Assin-Central New Patriotic Party’s Member of Parliament and owner of Oman-FM Radio’s accusation that Chairman Rawlings clearly appears to be staunchly behind the coverups of the shady business dealing of some ethnic Arabs or Lebanese businessmen in the country, strikingly recalled for me the former President’s alleged tweeting against the decision by the Akufo-Addo Administration to sign an “Enhanced” Security Cooperation Agreement with the United States. And oh, I egregiously forgot to add that in the case of the apparent open-season of wanton killings and other forms of violence that marked the first couple of years of the Kufuor Administration, it took the direct solicitation of the intervention of personnel from the US’ Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) to promptly squelch these indiscriminate killings.
To-date, nobody really knows why it took the FBI investigators only a couple of weeks, or so, as I understood it at the time, to put a definitive stop to these clearly deliberately orchestrated targeted killings. And this, of course, is primarily why I am heartily applauding Nana Akufo-Addo’s visionary and politically savvy decision to sign an “Enhanced” Security Cooperation Agreement with the United States’ Armed Forces (USAF). Of course, I clearly recognize the fact that the acronym of “USAF” actually refers to the United States’ Air Force. I strongly encourage the President not to back off his decision, not at any cost whatsoever. He need not be reminded of the fact that he has the full and commanding mandate of the Ghanaian electorate, and the Ghanaian citizenry, at large, to do what he and his cabinet and the New Patriotic Party’s Parliamentary Majority deem to be in the best interest of the country at this time.
Which naturally brings me to the patently false accusation by the National Democratic Congress’ Parliamentary Minority that the Military Cooperation Agreement reached between Ghana and the United States has absolutely no cut-off point or termination point. Well, the true fact of the matter is that one of the articles of the agreement clearly states that anytime that one of the parties to the pact decides that the agreement has outlived its usefulness or its objectives have been met, or for whatever discretionary reasons, that party has absolutely every right to discontinue the same, provided that the exiting party would have given a one-year’s advance notice to the other party. So I clearly don’t see this inexcusably vacuous talk about the aforesaid agreement’s being operationally perpetual or holding Ghanaians in the perpetual debt of the United States. In other words, I clearly don’t see how inordinately skewed against the “Sovereign” interests of the Ghanaian people this agreement is.
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