By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.
Garden City, New York
April 2, 2016
E-mail: [email protected]
I have written several times about the need for all district, municipal and metropolitan chief executives to be selected at the polling station by the ballot, if they are to be strictly held accountable to the people for their conduct. It may also be necessary to have the titles of Regional Ministers changed and converted into Regional Governors and make the occupants of such titles appointed directly by the people at the polling booth. The alleged arrest and imprisonment of an elementary schoolteacher, Mr. David Hammond, at Ekumfi-Otabanadzi, in the Central Region, makes such democratic reform immediately imperative (See “GNAT Demands Release of Teacher Imprisoned for Insulting DCE” Citifmonline.com / Ghanaweb.com 3/9/16).
Mr. Hammond was accused of insulting Mr. Ibrahim Dawson, the District Chief Executive Officer of Ekumfi, the very district which the late President John Evans Atta-Mills called his ancestral home. Actually, President Mills hailed from Ekumfi-Otuam, the village in which his remains ought to have been fittingly interred, had sanity reigned among the hopelessly cynical operatives of the National Democratic Congress (NDC). Hopefully, some day in the offing, the right thing will be done.
Anyway, it is not clear precisely what Mr. Hammond, the Ekumfi-Otabanadzi schoolteacher, told Mr. Dawson that so offended the latter as to prompt him to call for the arrest of the former who, we are told, was arrested while in the classroom instructing his pupils. Why the Ekumfi district police would act so grossly unprofessionally may also have to be promptly investigated by the Cape Coast Regional Commander of the Ghana Police Service (RC-GPS) or the Deputy Commissioner of Police for the Central Region (DCOP) to avert any future recurrence of such inexcusably embarrassing situation.
It also must have had some psychologically traumatizing impact on these largely innocent pupils the integrity of whose instructional and learning space was so flagrantly violated by the Ekumfi police. Whatever the contents of the alleged insult that Teacher Hammond is reported to have volleyed at Mr. Dawson, the Ekumfi District Chief Executive Officer, is not clear from the news report which is sourced by Ghanaweb.com to Citifmonline.com. What is crystal clear, however, is that the accused had not been charged with having physically assaulted DCE Ibrahim Dawson. Which means that whatever transpired between the two men was not a case of emergency into which the Ekumfi police had to promptly intervene.
Likewise, as already noted, the method by which the Ekumfi police chose to intervene, primarily on behalf of Mr. Dawson, had absolutely no professional credibility whatsoever. It clearly appears that the Ekumfi police had rather unprofessionally allowed themselves to be unwisely and unduly drawn into a situation which must have been purely personal on the part of a publicly embarrassed Mr. Dawson, who capriciously felt the need to gratuitously establish his relative political preeminence.
As of this writing, the executive operatives of the Ghana National Association of Teachers (GNAT), both at the regional and national levels, had reportedly had their say on the matter. But other than calling for the prompt release of one of their own and the issuance of a sharply worded condemnatory note, the GNAT leaders did not appear to have had much else to say. In other words, were these GNAT leaders on top of affairs, they would have promptly called for the removal or dismissal of Mr. Dawson from his post by President John Dramani Mahama, the man who personally appointed him.
It well appears that DCE Dawson had called a conference/meeting of some sort at which he had cavalierly presumed to either crassly intimidate or put these “village teachers” in their place. Unfortunately for Mr. Dawson, Teacher Hammond would have none of it. And so Mr. Dawson had to teach Mr. Hammond “where real power lies.” Well, as I clearly adumbrated at the beginning of this column, in an enviably functioning democracy it is among the people where real power lies, and Mr. Dawson would have conducted himself with utmost professionalism if he had been elected by the people instead of a neo-colonialist President Mahama, sitting comfortably at the Flagstaff in Accra. And he would have chosen his words very carefully, wisely, diplomatically and thoughtfully.
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