John Mahama should stop daring Akufo-Addo and thank the constitution instead

Ghana’s Constitution harbors a monstrosity of a provision labeled Indemnity Clause which sets apart coup makers and by extension, former leaders who may have flouted the laws of Ghana, preventing them from facing charges of corrupt or criminal deeds when they were in power.

Though there might have been several discussions about the pros and cons of this over-protective mechanism, with a section of Ghanaians calling for its expulsion and annihilation, a former president has sought to profiteer from this provision while throwing his weight about, hitting his chest like King Kong, and daring the President of the Republic, Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo to prosecute him if he so desires.

Ex-president John Dramani Mahama, with an outstretched neck and distended eyes, has dared the Akufo-Addo administration not to hesitate in prosecuting him if they have evidence of corruption against him. He made this remark in one of his pedestrian renditions to his party supporters while in London a week ago.

Mahama is emboldened by the preferential treatment the Constitution of the Republic of Ghana doles out to him and all those before him.

Something uncanny boggles the mind. The Constitutional Review Commission was established when the Mills/Mahama administration was in place. The Commission had traversed the entire country ostensibly to collate views and suggestions about sections of the 1992 Constitution with the sole objective of determining whether it would be needful to amend or alter certain provisions in it.

One of the most forcefully discussed topics was the need to expunge the indemnity clause from the Constitution. Other recommendations were duly captured, pending the then government’s consent to carry out measures to fine-tune the Constitution in its entirety.

An unfit for purpose white paper came out, shattering the dreams of the hundreds of thousands of people who would have wished that that banefully pernicious aspect of the Constitution was scrapped.

If Mahama was so minded to gift successive governments the free will to dig into his stewardship, wouldn’t he have allowed that clause to be pruned from the system?

John Mahama is audaciously asking Akufo-Addo to prosecute him with which laws of the land? The ones he and Mills blatantly refused to alter when the people had insisted they deserved no room in our Constitution?

These populists and tendentiously dramatic dirges he has been engaging in are tailored to enkindle the masses to accept the point that he is after all, not corrupt, and that if he were, the Akufo-Addo administration would have processed him for a court of competent jurisdiction.

Mahama is deluding himself thinking he is as clean as a white snow. He is as dirty as an unclean gutter. He is only being shielded by that provision in the Constitution that debars any criminal actions to be brought against him. Even Mills of blessed memory had the reason to believe that he was dirty, and commissioned a body to look into his handling of the planes the country acquired from Brazil. Even his own children believe he was corrupt to the teeth.

Former President Mahama should stop daring President Akufo-Addo and thank the provisions in the Constitution he failed to amend, for his ‘freedom’ and wandering around the world would have come to a jarring halt!

Source:  PK Sarpong, Writer at the Communications Bureau, Flagstaff House