He explained that President Akufo-Addo’s tenure has set back democracy by heavily politicising state institutions.
“The judiciary now has been packed with judges selected by this president and so people, I mean if you speak with anybody, they don’t believe that you can get justice from this judiciary,” Mahama told Woezor TV on Sunday. “At Parliament, you remember there was a state of the nation address where the minority were singing ‘and help us to resist oppressors rule’; that was what I was referring to. They feel oppressed.”
He added: “Parliament is a platform for the people’s representatives to speak out, but if you have a speaker who rather than promoting open debate tries to curtail it; then you have an oppressed parliament.”
Mahama stated that his successor has ‘intimidated’ a lot of people, citing the closure of XYZ and Radio Gold as examples.
“So I talked about the media; an intimidated media. A lot of radio stations are afraid to carry programmes that are critical of the government because they fear the fate that confronted XYZ and Gold would be unleashed on them. And the NCA keeps threatening them and so the media isn’t as free as it was before,” he said.
The former president noted that should institutions of state be flooded by political pawns, and some individuals who dare to criticize the government be bastardised, Ghana’s democracy will be in shambles.
“What I’m saying is that the tragedy of four years of Akufo-Addo is in the bastardisation and politicization of the institutions. These are the institutions that our democracy stands [on], and if they cannot do their work impartially then there is a problem,” he stressed.
