Breeding monsters

People are like dirt. They can either nourish you or help you grow as a person or they can stunt your growth and make you wilt and die. Plato You cannot lead if you are trapped by the followers. Myles Munroe.

Rick Warren’s statement that, “We are products of our past, but we do not have to be prisoners of it,” is very germane to the issue about dealing firmly with the political monsters we have bred in the name of partisan politics. If we fail, these monsters could grow into creatures which will devour us.

Whenever the issue of bestial and deviant political party supporters, euphemistically called foot soldiers, come up, we square off between the New Patriotic Party and the National Democratic Congress. We have tolerated and virtually glorified such bestiality.  Some deviants are leaders in our political parties.

Groups such as Azorka Boys, Kandahar Boys, Bolga Bulldogs and Invincible Forces have become synonymous with political party vandalism. Although they have not been  as brazen and open as what happened with the Action Troopers of the National Liberation Movement and Action Groupers of the Convention People’s Party, we do not have to passively sit and watch as they take the law into their own hands.

What happened in Kumasi last week with the Delta Forces, who besieged, attacked and vandalised the Ashanti Regional Administration to vent their spleen on an innocent public servant, must be roundly condemned. The crime of the victim was that he accepted his appointment by President Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo as the Ashanti Regional Security Co-ordinator.

The justification for the deviants was that they did not know him as having contributed to the electoral success of the party in the region and that one of their members should have been appointed to the position.

It is most unfortunate that even while the victim was in police custody, the physical attacks continued. The police must live above reproach as we do not want to be reminded of a similar situation in Yendi in the past, where the police commander shamefully stated that they could not act because the violence was partisan and politically motivated.

The brazen invasion of the offices of the Regional Coordinating Council could be a potential source of destabilising the country. Nobody should be deluded, that is how civil strife begins and where no action is taken, blossoms into civil war.

It has been reported that the leader of the gangsters has apologised to the President. We now allow ourselves to be deceived with such crocodile tears. We should not allow him to escape the just penalty of the criminal act because he has said that he is sorry. If the victim had died, the apology would not have returned him to life. Therefore, in just the same way that we condemned the ill-advised and infantile reasons adduced by former President John Dramani Mahama in pardoning the “Muntie Three”, we would denounce President Akufo-Addo if he allows himself to be conned into granting a pardon to the deviants. They must all be apprehended and tried in line with the rule of law and due process.

It is imperative that we set good examples for party supporters to understand that the mere fact that the party they support is in power does not put them above the law. They have to show healthy and positive examples to underline their loyalty to their political parties.  They should not act as hoodlums.

In the next few days, the President will be appointing district chief executives. If we do not stem the agitations and the open defiance and nip the violence in the bud, things would go awry, and there would be widespread mayhem in the country.  Where the police cannot deal firmly and decisively with one act of vandalism, there is no assurance that they can handle a diffused confused bigotry across the length and breadth of the country.

A stitch in time, they say, saves nine. As Dr Martin Luther King admonishes us, “The time is always right to do what is right” and, “An injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.” We do not have to interfere with the law to any unjust reason, for as Abraham Lincoln observes, “Do not interfere with anything in the constitution that must be maintained, for it is the only safeguard of our liberties.”

For those who would sneer at me for my political naivety, I can only take refuge in Chinua Achebe’s Anthills of the Savannah that, “But what is the use of bending your neck at me like the chicken to the pot when its real enemy is not the pot in which it cooks nor even the fire which cooks it, but the knife?” If the Delta Forces had not acted with bestiality, I would not have had cause to complain. Ghana must grow.