Has Kofi Bentil been bribed?

The case of the Delta 8 is clearly what in Italian-Mafia parlance may be aptly termed as “Cosa Nostra” or the internal, familial, affair of the ruling New Patriotic Party (NPP). But, predictably, it has become the pathological obsession of a post-election traumatized National Democratic Congress (NDC), obviously because the key NDC operatives believe they can make great political capital out of the same.

Well, it started off as a rude albeit unusual challenge to the constitutional right of President Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo to appoint his personal preference or choice for the post of Asante Regional Security Coordinator. We must quickly add that such preference is invariably informed by the professional expertise of executive or presidential advisers. And so it was not as if the President was arbitrarily using his executive powers or privilege to foist on the people of the Asante Region and local NPP operatives a personality who did not have the interests of the region and its people at heart. But even more importantly must be highlighted the fact that the Asante Regional Security Coordinator had been appointed strictly and purely on the basis of merit.

Unfortunately, however, those members of the Delta Force who had decided to challenge the executive legitimacy of President Akufo-Addo had clearly done so on grounds of unconstitutional nativism. In short, they were challenging the President not because they sincerely believed the appointee was not qualified for the job, but primarily because the appointee had not been born in the Asante Region and/or was not an Asante by ethnicity. Now, this kind of political primitivism has absolutely no place in Fourth Republican Ghanaian political culture.

Of course, this case has both national and “domestic,” or internal political party dimensions to it. The Delta Force, as we all must have come to know by now, is an unofficial NPP-affiliated militia organization, just as the Azorka Boys had been unofficially albeit functionally associated with the now-main opposition National Democratic Congress. The institution of the judiciary comes in here because some members of the Delta Force had forcibly attempted to nullify the authority and legitimacy of the executive powers of President Akufo-Addo, by literally attempting to physically remove the newly appointed Asante Regional Security Coordinator from the physical space of his office. Thirteen of the Delta Force’s operatives would be promptly arrested and committed to judicial custody.

Eight members of the Delta Force would be accused and charged with springing the 13 Delta Force operatives facing judicial sanctions and possible prison sentences out of the custody of the Kumasi Circuit Court. This is where the insufferable hypocrisy of the NDC’s opposition leaders comes in. In the case of the Montie Three/Trio, namely, Messrs. Alistair Nelson, Godwin Ako Gunn and Salifu Maase (aka Mugabe), who had threatened to rape and dismember Chief Justice Georgina Theodora Wood and several of her associates of the Supreme Court of Ghana, rabidly anti-judicial critics like Mr. Haruna Iddrisu, the Parliamentary Minority Leader, mordantly castigated the Wood Supreme Court on grounds that the 4-month prison sentence handed the Montie Three/Trio, severally, was too harsh. Then-President John Dramani Mahama would use his executive powers of privilege to literally ride roughshod over the Supreme Court’s verdict, after these NDC-sponsored media propagandists had served barely half of their 4-month sentences.

The NDC leaders’ scandalous argument was that the 4-month sentencing of the Montie Three/Trio to prison custody, at Nsawam, was too harsh and unjustified. Now, ironically, the same NDC critics who impugned the professional competence and integrity of the members of the judiciary in the sentencing of the Montie Three/Trio, would have the rest of the nation and the world believe that, somehow, the members of the same judicial system whose professional expertise they summarily wrote off barely a year ago, are now qualified to preside over the prosecution and sentencing of the Delta 8. And then to make matters even more scandalous and grotesque, we have Mr. Kofi Bentil, the Vice-President of the IMANI-Ghana think-tank, faulting the Kumasi police for having failed to manufacture the requisite forensic evidence to ensure that the Delta 8 operatives were promptly put behind bars (See “Delta 8: Police Would Have Found Evidence If They Wanted To – Kofi Bentil” MyJoyOnline.com / Modernghana.com 5/21/17).

In other words, in the opinion of Mr. Bentil, there is ample incriminating evidence to convict the Delta 8, except that the Kumasi police are playing politics with forensic science or the evidence. Well, what stops Citizen Bentil from presenting his Delta 8-incriminating evidence, if he has any?

By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.

English Department, SUNY-Nassau

Garden City, New York

 

 

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