We do not need a stakeholders’ engagement on hate speech when the birther of the dangerous moral contagion is the convener.
That the same beneficiary of insults as part of the 2024 electoral strategy is calling for a truce to the elevated state of invectives, is the apogee of dishonesty.
Who in Ghana does not know that the NDC commissioned Kevin Taylor to attack the integrity of respectable personalities in the country?
The only feeble response to the claim by Kevin Taylor that he was employed by the NDC to do what he does is that “I do not know him. I only met his father in 2024.” A response lacking smartness exposes the president’s underbelly for the attack of political snipers, and there are many.
The NDC has birthed monsters who are on the prowl, and the outbreeding caused by them has led to a more vociferous hi-breed on the other side of the aisle.
The heat being generated is too high and the President’s wife has not been spared.
Hate speech, which is the fulcrum of the proposed national stakeholders’ engagement, is a face-saving manoeuvre by a cornered President who cannot muster the strength to rein in his wayward minders.
Ghana is at the cross-roads and it behooves the President to step on the brakes. His party started the fire but he cannot douse it, his desperate stakeholders’ engagement too weak to deal with the subject, which like a cancer has infected the country’s body-politic.
Why would Kevin Taylor insult a former Second Lady without incurring a reprimand? Of course it is because he is only reciting the lines dictated to him by his boss.
Regarding the engagement on hate speech, we hereby label it a useless and resource wasting venture which would not stop hate speech, which has become a standard in politics.
Internet archives are replete with the seeds of foul language credited to the President when he was desperately seeking political power. To turn round today and express concern about something whose fruits he reaped is incongruous to the terms of honesty.
A ceasefire can only be achieved when the President orders his hounds to return to their kernels.
The correspondence containing the proposed stakeholders’ engagement on hate speech as signed by Callistus Mahama has an interesting portion. Here the President appears to be lamenting the recent arrests of TikTokers, which for us sounds rich.
During the reign of his predecessors, he is on record to have said that those who were arrested at the time for crossing the red line of responsible expression of their views, were being held on Akufo-Addo’s orders. This, for him, was an aberration in the 21st century.
Camilla Alhassan, a mother, and Salomey Awiti Bafoh, a senior nurse, also a mother, have lost their freedoms because of alleged unbridled modern media activities. These too were held on President Mahama’s orders if we are to stretch his logic.
The country is currently under a fog of political confusion occasioned by a so-called reset agenda. There is so much disenchantment, which is what demands a national conversation on and not an unproductive discussion on hate speech when the spectre of Akyem Sakawa Mafia is still hanging around President Mahama’s image. Let us be serious in this country.