By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.
A recent news report sourced by Ghanaweb.com to the New Patriotic Party-leaning Daily Guide newspaper, indicated that, once again, as they did in the lead-up to Election 2008, some hired hands among the ranks of the ruling National Democratic Congress (NDC) have resorted to the wanton use of violence and intimidation against supporters and sympathizers of the NPP in the Cape Coast municipality of the Central Region (See “NPP Warns NDC Over Attacks” Ghanaweb.com 10/6/12).
Furthermore, some hired thugs of the NDC have been reported to be engaged in the criminal act of tearing down posters and other electioneering campaign materials belonging to the New Patriotic Party. In this particular instance, what needs to be done is for members, supporters and sympathizers of the NPP to closely monitor and document – in both pictures and writing – the activities of the alleged NDC-hired vandals and make copies for local security agents and sympathetic media organizations for broadcast in various forms, including internet websites with massive global following like Ghanaweb.com and Modernghana.com, among a host of others.
On the physical violence front, the NPP needs to organize martial arts classes for its interested members, supporters and sympathizers in order to guarantee its preparedness to battle it out with the incorrigibly violence-oriented NDC hacks and operatives at polling stations and wherever the imperative need for either personal or collective self-defense arises. This strategy ought to be put in place throughout the country, particularly in places with a perennial history of rabidly anti-NPP violence such as the Volta Region (and now, we are learning to our utter displeasure and horror, the Central Region). The NPP leadership ought to operate – albeit with cautionary discipline – almost as if the recently exposed conspiratorial attempt by the NDC to railroad the outcome of Election 2012 in its favor were taking place right within the private and sacred confines of their own homes.
In the case of the female New Patriotic Party member, Ms. Justina Monko, who was allegedly “seriously [brutally?] beaten by an NDC sympathizer at Ntsin, a suburb of Cape Coast,” what needs to be done is for the local NPP executives to extensively and forensically document the incident in order to ensure that the assailant is promptly and vigorously prosecuted. The failure of the police to positively respond within a reasonable span of time could then be used to determine the proper course of defensive action, on the part of the aggrieved.
The Christian regime of passive cheek-turning must be confined to Christian religious culture – Ghanaian political culture is obviously dominated by hired goons and monsters of the sort that allegedly violated the corporeal integrity and the human and civil rights of Ms. Justina Monko, the staunch and active member of the Young Patriots Movement (YPM), the youth wing of the main opposition New Patriotic Party. And it goes without saying that in the absence of condign justice, or the swift and legitimate application of the rule of law, on the part of local security agents, monsters like Ms. Monko’s assailant ought to be spoken to in the language they best appreciate – the language of measurable self-defense!
*Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D., is Associate Professor of English, Journalism and Creative Writing at Nassau Community College of the State University of New York, Garden City. He is Director of The Sintim-Aboagye Center for Politics and Culture and author of “Obaasima: Ideal Woman” (iUniverse.com, 2004). E-mail: [email protected]. ###