Chief Justice Anin Yeboah
Yesterday, the larger and regular media as well as civil society were shocked to the marrow to hear about an incident in which a graduate nurse of the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology had threatened to torch the Supreme Court and its Law Lords and Ladies.
His argument was that Tsatsu Tsikata was being blocked by the justices from compelling the Chairperson of the Electoral Commission to get into the witness box.
Joining other colleagues on a Whatssup platform, titled ‘POLITICS AND GOVERNANCE’, Simon Awini Ayamga, a member of the National Democratic Congress’s student political wing, Tertiary Education Institutions Network (TEIN), overshot his rights and privileges as far as free speech is concerned.
As has been widely reported, he was alleged to have posted those threats on the platform.
‘Murdering’ sleep
He has, as a result, been ‘caged’ by the security agencies for investigations and possible trial.
For allowing himself to be misled, he has fallen into a situation where he cannot sleep. Because he belongs to a family and community as well as associations, sleep is abandoning everybody, including his wife, children and relatives.
Unfortunately, some of his TEIN and KNUST colleagues, who should be humble in their appeal for clemency, have fired statements to the media, blowing hot and cold and intimating that they would advise themselves on the next step to take, if their plea is ignored.
The errant student, it is turning out, has himself – in the time being – truncated his educational opportunities as a professional health worker and student with promise.
He ignored the fact that while he has a responsibility to himself and his family to be a responsible citizen, he allowed himself to be mired in an exercise in idiocy
Intriguingly, the leadership of the party that he sought to please had, by the time this piece was filed, not claimed that they had blessed his threat to blow up a whole Supreme Court in a matter in which he has little or no interest.
Horrid heritage
But that is the legacy that the National Democratic Congress as a political party is imposing on us and the succeeding generations. And this is a fact that one of the kingpins of the leading opposition party, Kwamina Ahwoi, in his ‘Working with Rawlings’ book, established when he hinted in the controversial memoir of the creation of a youth organ for the NDC to protect the party by muting what they claimed to be excesses of the founder of the NDC.
It is our prayer that the NDC, as they struggle to find fitting and responsible responses to the ruling on compelling the EC to enter the witness box, would be obliged to similarly assure the discerning public that the party abhors boys like Simon Ayamga and the other Simons who spoke on behalf of his TEIN colleagues.
Simply, the NDC must tell their boys that threatening the custodians of law and order is barbarian and criminal.
We would urge the NDC as a leading political organisation in Ghana to punish and disown those among them who get on that tangent.
This is no time to tone down the issues. If we must protect our Legislature, which has abundantly benefited the NDC as a political party, we must similarly protect the Judiciary, without which the whole state architecture would crumble.
For once, let the NDC come clean – without any doublespeak – on this crucial matter of a student, aged 33, threatening the Supreme Court Justices and the Chairperson of the EC.
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