By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.
When he recently won his parliamentary bid for the Akwatia Constituency, legend has it that Mr. Mohammed Ahmed Baba Jamal had been trying for the eighth time, consecutively, on the ticket of the so-called National Democratic Congress (NDC). And so when the Deputy Minister of Tourism says that the main opposition New Patriotic Party (NPP) lost Election 2012 because of the decision of God to severely punish Nana Akufo-Addo and his associates, it would be quite interesting if the former Deputy Information Minister could also tell Ghanaians whether his repeated failure to clinch the Akwatia parliamentary seat, at least seven times before, was a punishment from God, and for what set of reasons (See “NPP Defeat Is a Punishment from God – Baba Jamal” Modernghana.com 12/12/12). I suppose by God, Baba Jamal is implying the Allah of the Muslims.
If the last sentence has validity, then Mr. Jamal appears to be contradicting himself when the former Deputy Eastern Regional Minister asserts that “the NPP has lost the election gracefully and thus must accept the results in good faith.” You see, God is not known to be in the curiously esthetic business of punishing his targets and/or human victims “gracefully.” And so, I suppose this is Mr. Jamal’s thinly veiled acknowledgment of the fact that the National Democratic Congress brazenly colluded with the Afari-Gyan chaired Electoral Commission to rig Election 2012 in favor of the NDC. It is also quite certain that Baba Jamal is fully aware of the fact that there is widespread belief even among his own constituents that he did not win his own Akwatia seat fair and square. And so when he says that he is fully convinced that “God will never allow evil to triumph over light,” it is not quite certain whose “light” he is alluding to. For instance, is Baba Jamal alluding to the “Muslim Light” or “Christian Light” or “Tigare Light” or the crooked and knavish light of the Mahama-led National Democratic Congress.
Anyway, for those of our readers who may so soon have forgotten, Baba Jamal was the very person who as Deputy Information Minister under the late President John Evans Atta-Mills, corralled government journalists, largely employees of the Information Services Department, and sternly cautioned them against writing and publishing objective truths about the state of the nation that did not put the National Democratic Congress government in good light. He had been caught on audio-magnetic tape instructing his captives not to hesitate to unconscionably massage and doctor facts surrounding government policies: “Tell the people that the President has just presented ten Ndama cows to the inmates of the Osu Children’s Home, even you personally witnessed him present only five lean goats to that institution.” Well, this is a fairly accurate paraphrase of one such pep-talk conducted by the Akwatia NDC-MP-Elect.
What we are, of course, alluding to here in no uncertain terms, is the fact that as Deputy Information Minister, Mr. Mohammed Ahmed Baba Jamal spent most of his time criminally and brazenly violating the conscience and ethical conduct of government media operatives; and so for Mr. Jamal to impute NPP electoral defeat to an act of Divine Province does not pass moral muster. At best, Mr. Jamal’s interpretation is immitigably blasphemous and at the worst, simply mischievous. But since he started this off-color joke seeking to luridly convert God/Allah into a selective sadist, maybe Baba Jamal ought to be bluntly told that the last political party in Ghana that Divine Providence would presume to either consort with, or even sympathize with, is a clinically unconscionable “Cash-and-Carry” political juggernaut like the Rawlings-minted National Democratic Congress, unless, of course, Baba Jamal also wants Ghanaians and the rest of the world to believe that it was Divine Providence who instructed the Rawlings-led P/NDC to summarily cause the brutal assassination of the three Akan high court judges on June 30, 1982 Mafia style.
You see, Satan too has his partisans on the Ghanaian political landscape; and nobody needs to be told on whose side reigns General Mosquito Lucifer. And if Mr. Jamal really wants to dare his main political opponents to a moral contest of rhetorical objectivity and circumspection vis-à-vis the mutual depiction of each other’s image to members of the Ghanaian electorate, then the Akwatia NDC-MP-Elect had better look straight into the eyes of Ghanaian citizens and frankly assert that, indeed, never in even one instance did any key operative of the National Democratic Congress impugn the integrity of former President Kufuor and/or Nana Akufo-Addo.
One thing, however, is incontrovertibly certain: the NPP is poised to winning their case over the massive voting irregularities that attended Election 2012. But whether Ghanaians are forced to dangerously inch towards Kigali pretty much depends on the widely perceived sense of justice at which they arrive in the wake of the verdict that eventually gets handed down by Chief Justice Georgina Wood and her venerable associates on the Supreme Court of Ghana. On the foregoing score, about the only counsel worth giving the members of the National Executive Committee of the New Patriotic Party is the timeliness with which they file their court case. Needless to say, time is fast petering out, regardless of the generous temporal window proffered them by our Fourth-Republican Constitution.
In other words, the Akufo-Addo Legal Team could well win their case in court; but whether it gets to really overturn the inescapably tainted declaration of President Mahama as the winner of Election 2012, and thus form the next government, pretty much depends on the team’s ability to get their proverbial act together and boldly confront their political opponents in court before Mr. Mahama’s so-called Transitional Team has completed its patently ungodly work of specious self-congratulation. Indeed, the Road to Kigali can be decidedly averted by the simple and honest ministration of justice. Our own national motto underscores this fact: “Freedom and Justice,” these are the foremost twin ingredients of a viable nationhood. Peace, of course, is the dividend.
*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 “Ghanaian Politics Today” (Lulu.com, 2008). E-mail: [email protected]. ###