By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.
Garden City, New York
Jan. 16, 2016
E-mail: okoampaahoofe@optimum.net
You may decide to envisage her as a minor political figure who provides a well-needed comic relief to the ragged terrain of Ghanaian politics. Recently, the leader of the Ghana Freedom Party (GFP), Ms. Akua Donkor, was reported by the media to have said that Nana Akufo-Addo was the most dangerous politician in the country. I have yet to acquaint myself with the full details of her comments in that particular instance. Until then, suffice it to say to Ms. Donkor that it was President John Dramani Mahama, and not Nana Akufo-Addo, who secretly arranged with the U.S. Pentagon (Defense Department) and the State Department (Foreign Ministry) to resettle Messrs. Bin Atef and Al-Dhuby, the two Saudi-born Yemeni terrorists in our globally recognized sovereign territorial space.
Now, it looks as if the founding-leader of the GFP has been consorting with these two Arab terror suspects who each spent some 14 years housed at the U.S.-established and operated Guantanamo Naval Base’s Maximum-Security Prison facility in Cuba. What is quite interesting to learn here is the fact that the Island of Cuba is only 90 miles offshore from Florida or mainland United States. If, indeed, these two criminal suspects were of such low-risk caliber, why would the United States, the most technologically advanced country in the world, with equally the most sophisticated national security system, decide to send Messrs. Bin Atef and Al-Dhuby some 7,000 miles away to Ghana for a 24-month heel-cooling furlough before these men could be asked by Ghanaian authorities to relocate?
Well, it looks as if Ms. Donkor has been consorting with Messrs. Bin Atef and Al-Dhuby, perhaps even generously providing bedroom services to at least one of them at the behest of President Mahama, the generous benefactor with whom she has been globetrotting for quite a while now. Which undoubtedly explains why the GFP leader finds it so convenient to malign the 2016 Presidential Candidate of the New Patriotic Party (NPP), even while also rapturously commending President Mahama for availing her of the ebullient comfort of these Arabo-Muslim Jihadist Strong Breeds.
Ms. Donkor appears to be learning very fast from her new political bedmates. Recently, for instance, she was reported to have declared her intention to ban the Jehovah’s Witness Christian organization on the ironic grounds that the adamant refusal by the members of this New York City-headquartered religious sect to vote in both local and national elections was to blame for the perennial and consistently low voter turnout in the country.
Ms. Donkor has been vocally shilling for the President for quite some time now; and so I hope it was not Mr. Mahama who put such a patent factual poppycock into her noggins. Indeed, if the GFP leader had paid sedulous attention to the 2012 Presidential-Election Petition, she would have heard Dr. Kwadwo Afari-Gyan, the recently retired Chairman of the Electoral Commission (EC), tell the Atuguba Panel that the integrity of the country’s electoral system suffered a remarkable level of “over-voting,” meaning that in quite a considerable number of polling stations and constituencies across the country, more people than those captured in the National Voters’ Register cast the ballot.
Now, I don’t think that Ms. Donkor wants Ghanaians to believe that it is the non-voting members of the Jehovah’s Witnesses who are to blame for the problem of over-voting, rather than the clearly nonexistent problem of “under-voting.” Or does she? Ms. Donkor’s pet peeve appears to be the fact that the Jehovah’s Witnesses are not averse to participating in the periodic censes exercises conducted by the Ghana Statistical Services (GSS) department, but flatly refuse to indulge in partisan politics. I am here, of course, far less interested in the scriptural aspect of the decision by the members of the Jehovah’s Witness organization not to participate in Ghana’s local and national elections. I am quite certain that the same attitude prevails right here in the United States. And the beauty of it all is that no politician or civic leader is complaining.
Rather, what I am passionately interested in is the fact that Ms. Donkor would presume herself to reserve the inviolable right to force members of the JW to actively participate in partisan politics. Would she consent to being forced to register to vote as a New Patriotic Party member or even a National Democratic Congress’ partisan? And just what sort of political regime or culture did she have in mind, when Ms. Donkor decided to call the NDC-piggybacking organization that she founded and continues to lead the Ghana Freedom Party? In other words, precisely what sort of “freedom” was Ms. Donkor thinking about?
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