Since the opposition National Democratic Congress lost the 2016 presidential election, it has resorted to all sorts of propaganda and fables to look credible in the estimation of its members.
Particularly for the national leaders and former President John Dramani Mahama, who was also presidential candidate of the NDC, the temptation to lie has been tremendously ridiculous.
Chief among the litany of ugly noises they have been making, apart from going to court without any evidence, has been calls for a probe into acts of violence that were recorded during the December 2020 general elections – as if the NDC has been any cleaner since 1992.
The NDC’s noisemaking in that regard has come from every layer of the party, including communicators, national executives as well as organs of the NDC that had been formed overnight just for purposes of noisemaking.
That is why the aggregation of quavers into those discordant notes must annoy every Ghanaian as it has the Majority Leader, Osei Kyei-Mensah-Bonsu.
Intriguingly, those behind that ugly noise include an MP who has a record of winning his seat by infesting Bawku Central over a decade ago with blazing guns.
Enter, Mahama Ayariga, the villain, who has been lucky that the scars of his blazing guns effaced by the decision of the then Kufour government to let sleeping dogs lie, though the NPP administration at that time could have pressed for investigations in which the then candidate could have been implicated and punished.
By-election violence
The NDC has also, since the Ayawaso West Wuogon by-election, pretended to be more Catholic than the Pope in daubing the incumbent government in murderous colours, when it is the party and its vigilante actors who have muddied the political terrain as a matter of habit and tradition since 1992.
From Wulensi and Tain through Talensi to Chereponi, the victims had been the NPP rather than the NDC.
Even when it was the NPP that was in power, the record of vigilantes carrying firearms had largely been NDC – with the Azorka Boys being the most ferocious of all vigilante groups known to have been assailing the terrain since 1992.
That is why we agree with the Majority Leader when he describes as hypocritical the filing of a private motion by some Minority MPs to look into the death of some six persons who lost their lives during the 2020 general elections.
These MPs on March 23, 2021, tabled a private members’ motion in the House seeking a full-scale probe into acts of violence that occurred in the 2020 general elections. The MPs are Haruna Iddrisu, Muntaka Mubarak, Mahama Ayariga, Alhassan Suhuyini, and James Agalga.
More hypocritical is that they pretend to want “the scope of the probe to factor in inappropriate interferences by state security in the elections and violence against citizens, leading to the loss of lives.”
Widening scope
According to them, this is in line with a promise made by the IGP and other security agencies as regards a commitment to protecting lives.
Of course, ordinarily, no Ghanaian would support any idea of election violence; which is why we are all making noise about it, even if hypocritically.
However, as the Majority Leader and Minister of Parliamentary Affairs, Osei Kyei-Mensah-Bonsu, pointed out, we must – if we indeed intend to set up a probe – widen the scope and look as far back as 1992 through 2000 and 2004 to date.
Unfortunate
Unfortunately, in this country, security agencies deliberately putting in place a strategy to smoke out suspects who are holding weapons illegally has not been a tradition, allowing for some of these things to inflict us during elections.
With the history of the June 4 and December 31 coup d’etats, it is not difficult guessing which political groups have private weapons which they rely on during such political calendars.
Added to that is the ease with which security personnel bring in weapons to sell on the open market, without the relevant agencies monitoring movement and use of such commodities.
It is time that the NDC is told that politics is not the same as mischief or ‘kwaani kwaani’ (hide and seek).
