More ministers and some appointees of the National Democratic Congress (NDC) government are putting pressure on President John Mahama to grant amnesty to the three party activists who were convicted for contempt by the Supreme Court last week.
The appointees have been lining up at the premises of Radio Gold which also houses Montie FM at Laterbiokoshie, Accra, where the convicts broadcast their hate remarks, to append their signatures and force the president to invoke the clemency clause in Article 72 of the 1992 Constitution.
Key ministers that have already signed the petition include Prof. Jane Naana Opoku Agyemang (Education), Nana Oye Lithur (Gender Children and Social Protection), Elizabeth Ofosu Agyare (Tourism, Culture and Creative Arts), Samuel Okudzeto Ablakwa (deputy Education), Felix Kwakye Ofosu (deputy Communications), Benjamin Dagadu (deputy Energy and Petroleum), Benita Okiti Dua (deputy Fisheries) among others.
Appointees like Valerie Sawyerr, former deputy Chief of Staff at the Office of the President, and others have signed; former Attorney General Betty Mould Iddrisu, now a vice chairperson of the NDC, has also given her endorsement.
Even maverick politician, Akua Donkor, has also been there to sign the petition; and there were unconfirmed rumours that the pen she used to append her signature was even turned upside down.
Dr. Nyaho Nyaho-Tamakloe, who calls himself a founding member of the opposition New Patriotic Party (NPP) but acts like an NDC activist, also went to Radio Gold premises to support the convicts who had constantly attacked his party’s flagbearer.
Interestingly, this same Nyaho-Tamakloe lambasted Kwadwo Owusu Afriyie aka Sir John, then NPP General Secretary, when he (Sir John) was nearly jailed by the same court for contempt during the landmark Presidential Election Petition in 2013.
The book containing the petition was opened by a group calling itself the Research and Advocacy Platform (RAP), believed to have been formed by Felix Kwakye Ofosu.
The Convicts
The three convicts, Salifu Maase aka Mugabe, host of “Pampaso,” a political programme on an Accra-based Montie FM, together with Godwin Ako Gunn, 39 and Alistair Tairo Nelson, 41, apart from the four-month sentence each, were ordered to pay GH¢10,000 each as fines or in default, serve an additional month in jail for scandalizing the courts.
The NDC is reported to have paid the fines on their behalf, even though the same party before the sentencing claimed, the contemnors were acting on their own and not in the party’s name.
Mugabe had always boasted that he speaks to defend the president and if because of Mr. Mahama he would go to jail, so be it.
Death Threats
The NDC communicators had threatened to kill the justices sitting on an election-related case, thereby incurring their (Justices’) wrath and cited them for criminal contempt.
Mugabe had told his panelists to ‘open fire’ on the justices and they in turn did so with threats of death, in addition to allowing a certain Nash of Mataheko to ‘marry’ Chief Justice Georgina Theodora Wood.
The Attorney general has refused to press criminal charges against the convicts, now called the Montie 3.
By William Yaw Owusu