Since the High Court acquitted and discharged the 15 men who were hurriedly arraigned before it for allegedly murdering Ya Na Yakubu Andani, Ghanaians have not been spared any of the sort of nonsense which is so typical of the ruling NDC.
Rampaging youth have destroyed property in Tamale and former Rawlings has been speaking a lot of crap going as far as to say that the violence in Tamale was justified. So-called legal advisers like David Annan have been blaming former president Kufuor for the acquittal (a point Rawlings will not stop making) and then there are all those NDC supporters who have been waving their fingers at President Mills, accusing him of failing to fulfill his promise to jail the killers of the Ya Na.
Some have even threatened that the President should not step a foot in the Northern Region. How crazy is that? Where, in times of peace, does a president get threatened and told not to step in a part of the country he rules? And all of this because justice spoke so eloquently that you cannot arrest 15 people, accuse them of murder, put them in the dock without evidence, without a case and expect that they will be convicted?
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The sheer scale of the incompetence is baffling and frightening. But what do you expect from an administration which has someone like David Annan as legal adviser?
And they turn around to blame Kufuor for making them lose the case because the courts are packed with Kufuor’s judges. What sort of nonsense is that?
In all of this, the person who has been the most annoying has been Jerry Rawlings. He led this country for nearly 20 years as a despot and had a constitution tailor-made for him, to ease his passage out of power. Yet he doesn’t seem to have read the supreme law of the land. He makes it seem like we are living in a country where every new president is expected to come in with his own bunch of judges so they will create their own brand of justice and enforce it. The stupidity of his argument is nauseating and it’s frightening that no one in NDC – not even the president – is willing to tell him to stop talking crap and start thinking for once.
Rawlings ought to start thinking – not about his parochial interests – but that which is in the best interest of the nation. All his foolish talk, creating the impression that the judge in the Ya Na case just woke up one morning and decided to rule against the government is just feeding the sense of grievance of the Andani family, making them more angry and ready to do dangerous things, which would inevitably lead to the loss of more lives.
I, for one, have had enough of Rawlings’ nonsensical claim he has some sort of evidence that would lead to the successful prosecution of those who killed the Ya Na, not to mention his inordinately superior stance that he is some sort of angel who would bring justice and peace to Dagbon. He started making those claims when the Kufuor administration was in power, annoyingly insisting that he won’t provide the evidence because he wasn’t sure what the administration would do with it. Now that he has his own ‘crew’ in power, he is still reluctant to provide the evidence. It all makes one wonder when he would be trusting enough to provide the evidence. When his wife becomes president? Over my dead body!
If you ask me, I’d say Rawlings hasn’t got any evidence to give. He is just, as young people like to say, running his mouth to gain some attention and appear to be the only one who cares about the intractable conflict in Dagbon. Someone should tell Mr. Rawlings that he doesn’t care about Dagbon more than any of us do. We all care. We all would love to see the murderers of the Ya Na brought to justice. But justice is not what Rawlings defines it to be.
Justice is what a judge says it is. If you don’t like what the judge says, you don’t go around making ugly noises and encouraging violence. You go to a higher court and appeal. That’s the law. If Rawlings doesn’t like it, he should go and hang.
In this particular case, most Ghanaians – except those poisoned by Rawlings’ nonsense and Atta Mills’ naivety – will agree that the 15 suspects received justice. The judge couldn’t have jailed them simply on the say-so of Atta Mills, Jerry Rawlings or David Annan.
