Opinion: On Political Killings, Mahama Is a Joke by Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., PhD

Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe Jnr., Ph.D.

He would have spared himself a lot of shame and embarrassment, if Candidate John Dramani Mahama had wisely chosen to celebrate this year’s annual Independence Day festivities in Kumasi, the Asante Regional Capital, with the rest of the National Rollcall of Who’s Who in Ghanaian Politics and Culture. Instead, the man who has never mustered the convictions of his conscience – that is, if he has any conscience at all – to inform Ghanaians precisely under what circumstances his then immediate boss, President John Evans Atta-Mills, met his proverbial Maker had the chutzpah to appear before the family members, relatives and the neighbors of Mr. Mawutor Adzahli, the Sogakope District Assemblyman, who was brutally shot and stabbed on March 1, reportedly, by a platoon of killers who may very well have been hired assassins.

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We are also informed that the deceased was a mobile-money merchant, so it is equally likely that Mr. Adzahli, whose wife and young child had reportedly been severely wounded in the attack, had been targeted for robbery. And there is evidence pointing to a safety cabinet in the home of the deceased assemblyman having been broken into by the alleged assailants. As bona fide Ghanaians, at least the overwhelming majority of Ghanaian citizens, may have become aware by now, for Candidate Mahama, every incidence of hideous political killing or assassination is an occasion for the hearty celebration of an “inscrutably witty Divine Providence” who is in the invariable habit of literally kicking political deadwoods out of the way, in order to auspiciously elevate into the glorious limelight those who actually deserve to have already long been crowned kings but were, somehow, unjustifiably being forced to cool their heels in the wings.

In the wake of the grisly bedroom-stabbing assassination of Mr. Joseph Boakye Danquah-Adu, then the New Patriotic Party’s Member of Parliament for Akyem-Abuakwa-North, for example, absolutely no such urgent call as the now-Candidate Mahama recently issued to the Sogakope members of the Ghana Police Service (GPS), to speed up its efforts in tracking the suspected killers of Mr. Adzahli, had gone up the police wires, as it were. instead, we had then-Inspector-General of the Ghana Police Service (IGP), Mr. John Kudalor, rudely and abruptly yank the lead investigator, Dr. George Akuffo-Dampare, from the case immediately after the arrests of the prime criminal suspects and reliable information began to rapidly filter into the media mainstream, indicating that, indeed, the murder of Mr. Danquah-Adu, grandson of the legendary and immortalized Doyen of Gold Coast and Ghanaian Politics, may very well have been contracted by a higher up operative of the Mahama government, at the Mahama Flagstaff House, to be precise.

Dr. Akuffo-Dampare, arguably the most crackerjack or foremost forensics specialist in the service and Police Commander for the Greater-Accra Region at the time, would be promptly demoted and transferred to the far more modest post of Rector at the Winneba Police-Training Academy, in the nearby Central Region. The fact of the matter is that even as substantive President of the Sovereign Democratic Republic of Ghana, Mr. Mahama lacked the requisite credibility where the subject of political killings was concerned. For example, we all witnessed the same half-hearted attitude towards the point-blank shooting assassination of Mr. Peter Kenyenso, the then District Chief Executive Officer (DCE) of the Nkwanta-South Constituency, then a part of the Volta Region and presently in the Akufo-Addo-created Oti Region. Here again, a staunch lock-stepping Mahama deputy, Dr. Edward Kofi Omane-Boamah, the extant Minister of Communications, would literally tell then-Candidate Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo to take a hike, when the latter demanded, as a matter of national interest, to be updated on the progress and the findings of the purported police investigations into the death of Mr. Kenyenso.

Vis-à-vis the acid-dousing assassination of Mr. Adams Mahama, then Upper-East Regional Chairman of the then main opposition New Patriotic Party, Mr. Mahama has in recent months publicly and vigorously, albeit crassly and unconscionably, been arguing for Mr. Gregory Afoko, the prime suspect personally named by the dying Mr. Adams Mahama, to be promptly set free by the courts, even when all the available evidence inextricably points to the criminal culpability of Mr. Afoko, whose elder brother, Mr. Paul Afoko, on whose apparent behalf Mr. Adams Mahama had been so barbarically slain, was the then John Dramani Mahama-schmoozing and Akufo-Addo-stabbing National Chairman of the New Patriotic Party.

Going to Sogakope to purportedly commiserate with the family members and the relatives of the late Mr. Adzahli was clearly a pointless trip on the part of the man who has more than amply demonstrated time and time again that he has absolutely no respect for the civilized rule of law and order. But, of course, we also know that Candidate Mahama would not have felt comfortable being hosted in Kumasi by His Majesty, The Asantehene, Otumfuo Osei-Tutu, II, the most globally recognized invested traditional Ghanaian ruler, whom Candidate Mahama recently told the world was a pathological liar whose opinions and perspectives of The Asantehene’s own role in the midwifing and the shaping of Ghana’s democratic culture could not be trusted. This was in response to Otumfuo Osei-Tutu’s presentation on the growth and development of Ghana’s democratic political culture before a plenary session of the United Nations’ General Assembly.

You see, with Comrade Mahama, it is all about the recklessly blind grab for power, boot-for-boot style, devoid of any substance whatsoever. At any rate, the real question that Ghanaian voters need to ask, as they head for the polls come December 2020, is the following: Are we really prepared for another open-season of political murders and Woyome-style of the criminal hemorrhaging of our National Treasury a la the National Democratic Congress-minted Judgment-Debt juggernaut? I hope not!

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