President John Mahama
Another disturbing entry has joined the growing list of threats to the freedom of speech in the country.
The arrest of the Agona West Constituency Organiser of the New Patriotic Party (NPP), David Essandoh, as contained in a story in this edition says it all about how intolerant the incumbent government has become a little under a year and a half of its life so far.
To become intolerant of a social media post – ‘Dumsor Is Back’ – is for us the apogee of intolerance and highhandedness of a government which claims to relish the rule of law and free speech.
We find this act of incessant arrests of dissenting voices as a growing trend which should be condemned by well-meaning Ghanaians, especially cherishers of democracy.
Now we understand the true meaning of the so-called reset agenda of the National Democratic Congress (NDC).
This threat of a loading Kwame Nkrumah-style Preventive Detention Act (PDA), 1958, under which those perceived to be opposed to government policies were simply arrested and detained without judicial basis and indefinitely, would be resisted by all means as the law allows us to.
Ghana is on a retrogression mode, not a reset agenda, the development under review and others before it attesting to that sufficiently. This country cannot afford to take two steps backwards in time having come this far from the repressive regime of the military junta of the Provisional National Defence Council (PNDC).
We are tempted to think that the NDC as a party is longing for a return to the repressive rule of its forebear…the PNDC. Unfortunately, Ghanaians cannot allow this to happen, that chapter indefinitely confined to the dark pages of our history.
We are scared about some victims of this repression not eventually being accounted for as we continue to witness this trend of arrests of dissenters. The government security actors could simply feign ignorance about the whereabouts of abducted persons.
Bad guys could on the other hand target persons and abduct them by simply claiming they are state actors. After all, NDC-aligned security operatives who are sent on such eerie operations do not show documents to back their operations. Questions about their authorities are met with drawn side arms. That is their modus operandi.
Our fears are grounded in the history of the abduction and murder of the three high court judges. What if one day one of the pages of the PNDC rulebook is played by the NDC? When hooded men dressed in police uniforms Gestapo-style descend upon a residence in the dead of night claiming to be state operatives with no document to support their mission and abduct a targeted individual, anything can happen.
So what has happened to those who put out a caricature of Member of Parliament (MP) for Ofoase Ayirebi, Kojo Oppong Nkrumah, in a nasty posture?
When the law ceases to be uniform, justice is compromised. That is what is unfolding in this country.
Today, caricatures, satirical literature and cartoons could land their originators in trouble under the incumbent administration, even as they are allowed under democracies. Russia here we come.