A New Patriotic Party-affiliated militia group or organization called “De Eye Group,” or some such nominal designation, has allegedly been discovered to have been training at the Osu-based Christiansborg Castle for the past two years so what? And, by the way, wasn’t it in the same Osu Castle that Chairman Jerry John Rawlings and his wife and Ghana’s longest-reigning First Lady, Nana Konadu Agyeman-Rawlings, for some two protracted decades kidnapped, tortured and “provided” the so-called Identification Haircuts to ordinary Ghanaian citizens whom they either hated or simply considered to be “Enemies of the State,” without any apparent provocation, whatsoever, by which the infamous Bloody Couple meant bona fide Ghanaian citizens who did not agree with their murderous and dictatorial policies, including, of course, the savage abduction and brutal assassination, by way of an anti-Akan purging of the highest court of the land, at the time, to wit, the High Court of Ghana?
The obvious reference here, of course, is to the grisly and barbaric murder and torching of the bullet-riddled corpses of Justices Cecilia Koranteng-Addow, Frederick Poku-Sarkodie and Kwadwo Agyei Agyepong. Well, in the equally infamous case of the so-called Identification Haircuts, it was with the apparent complicity of then Vice-President John Evans Atta-Mills, the former tax-law professor of Ghana’s flagship academy, the University of Ghana, whose “mysterious” death at the very same Osu Christiansborg Castle, that is, the Danish slave fort which for some 50 protracted years, or a half-century, was used by postcolonial Ghanaian leaders, including President Kwame Nkrumah, who also partly operated from his Atlantic Ocean-overlooking cabin at the Independence Square and the Flagstaff House, to further dominate and wantonly enslave the good and unsuspecting Ghanaian people.
In other words, practically speaking, there is absolutely nothing solemn or sacred or even politically respectable about the uses to which postcolonial Ghanaian leaders have either used or been alleged to have used the Osu Castle for. Indeed, it was the same Danish-built slave fort in which then-Chairman Jerry John Rawlings, some 18 years later, personally and publicly confessed to a Nigerian journalist, well after the fact, to have received the whopping payola sum of some $ 5 Million (USD) from Gen. Sani Abacha, late, the globally infamous tyrant and dictator, to do the dirty public relations bidding of image reconstructive surgery at the New York City Headquarters of the United Nations’ Organization (The UN). And so for all practical intents and purposes, having the New Patriotic Party-affiliated militia group called “De Eye Group” trained at the Osu Castle was definitely perfectly in keeping with established protocol.
I am also quite certain that it was inside this very bloody slave fort that the entire ungodly idea of the presently main opposition National Democratic Congress (NDC) was mooted, hatched and officially founded and operated. But even more significantly, so far, other than patently unreliable hearsay, there is absolutely no forensically sustainable evidence, whatsoever, clearly pointing to the direct involvement or complicity of President Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo in either the establishment or operation of the “De Eye Group” of militia operatives. It also beats my imagination why if, indeed, Nana Akufo-Addo was directly or even indirectly involved in the recruitment and training of the members of the “De Eye Group,” the President would have assigned members of the Short Commission operating space at the Osu Castle which, we are told, was officially vacated by former President John Dramani Mahama sometime in 2013, perhaps in the wake of incessant harassment by the ghost of the man whose demise the former Rawlings’ Communications Minister publicly and heartily celebrated as the “auspiciously inscrutable act of Divine Providence.”
Paradoxically, and by the same token, it would have clearly constituted the very height of absurdity, to speak much less about plain stupidity, for President Akufo-Addo to have pretended that he was surrounded by a national security apparatus that was professionally operated by people who were non-partisan in temperament and attitude towards both the Democratic Republic of Ghana and the Commander-in-Chief of the Ghana Armed Forces at the time of his official assumption of the democratic reins of governance on January 7, 2017.
By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., PhD
English Department, SUNY-Nassau
Garden City, New York
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