I know they are schooled on protocol from time to time; what I don’t know is whether such schooling entails the provision of any fundamental instruction on the respective roles of the three branches of Government, and how these administrative arms function together. Which is why I was quite a bit amused to read the news story in which the National Democratic Congress’ Member of Parliament (NDC-MP) for Adaklu presumed to instruct President Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo on the legitimate exercise of his emergency executive powers in the matter of Mr. Yahya Jammeh and the good people of The Gambia (See “MP Challenges Akufo-Addo’s Gambia Troop Deployment” Classfmonline.com / Ghanaweb.com 1/19/17).
The MP concerned, Mr. Kwame Governs Agbodza, curiously claims that as the constitutionally elected President and Commander-in-Chief of the Ghana Armed Forces, Nana Akufo-Addo had absolutely no right to have dispatched some 205 combat troops to The Gambia to facilitate the implementation of the democratic election of Mr. Adama Barrow as the new leader of that strip-mall country that borders both banks of the Senegambia River. Mr. Agbodza would rather have had Ghana’s parliament debate the decision prior to the issuance of President Akufo-Addo’s executive order.
By the way, Mr. Agbodza belongs to the same legislative assembly, for the most part, that sat duck and mum while former President John Dramani Mahama summarily reversed the Supreme Court’s verdict in the landmark matter of the so-called Montie Trio, in which a gang of National Democratic Congress’ media propagandists who had threatened to visit mayhem and carnage on some members of the Wood Supreme Court for flatly refusing to collude with Electoral Commissioner Charlotte Kesson-Smith Osei to rig the 2016 general election, respectively, in favor of then-President Mahama and the National Democratic Congress, was sprung out of the Nsawam Medium-Security Prison after serving barely half of their joint sentence.
But what especially gored my horse, as it were, was Mr. Agbodza’s rather brazen assertion that the situation in The Gambia, in which an electorally defeated President Jammeh, who had been ruling that country with an iron-fist for twenty-two years, promptly conceded defeat only to reverse himself exactly one week later, could not be equated with a humanitarian crisis. Contextually speaking, it is quite understandable that Mr. Agbodza would take such an at once imperious and outrageous stance, primarily because he belongs to a party that was founded by Ghana’s most extortionate and longest-reigning military dictator, as well as the least democratically inclined of all the country’s Fourth-Republican leaders.
At any rate, what does Mr. Agbodza mean when he so insolently asserts that the concerted decision by the several ECOWAS leaders to contribute troops towards their previous consensual resove to oust the Gambian strongman and replace Mr. Jammeh with the democratically elected Mr. Barrow “is a pre-planned aggression against another country and I think that parliament must give approval”? Is Mr. Agbodza, for instance, saying that the people of The Gambia have absolutely no right to demand and fight for the establishment of a constitutionally democratic system of governance? We must also quickly point out that the Gambian problem was inherited by President Akufo-Addo from former President Mahama, the bona fide leader of the critic’s own party.
To be certain, the decision to contribute troops to help bring about a popularly ratified constitutional democracy to The Gambia was taken by former President John Dramani Mahama, acting as an envoy for the newly elected President Akufo-Addo, and other major West-African leaders like Nigeria’s President Mahammadu Buhari. We need to also significantly recall the fact that in the wake of an abortive military putsch aimed at ousting President Jammeh, scarcely a couple of years ago, then-President Mahama, who doubled as ECOWAS chairman, had quickly flown into Banjul, the Gambian capital, to heartily commiserate with his “West-African Brother President.”
In other words, in Mr. Agbodza, we are talking about a self-righteous moral reprobate and a narcissist pretending to be a staunch believer in, and an upholder of, the civilized democratic rule of law. And this is more than simply annoying. To be certain, it is insufferably nauseating.