Kofi Totobi-Quakyi
Of those who do not qualify to give moral lessons to President Akufo-Addo, one-time National Security Minister Kofi Totobi-Quakyi stands tall.
With the blood of those who died when he managed the National Security Department of the state which at the time flaunted the trappings of a military junta, his queries about what in his opinion are moral deficiencies under the incumbent political administration sound rich.
Democracy allows such morally tarnished individuals to also join any national parley as he did through a subtle query to the President and elsewhere on the public space.
We are pleased though that history is replete with his sordid record of inhumanity to his compatriots and how the immorality is enough to gag him for the rest of his life in other dispensations. Thanks also to google which as a repository of these nasty footnotes is available for easy reference.
Once upon a time, Ghana chronicled the killer instincts of the man under review in full flight and unstoppable: he was bestowed with the powers to deal with anybody he deemed a national security threat. This is the man who today spots the cassock, Bible in hand, as it were, pontificating to the President about what is right and vice versa.
Wonders indeed would never end and the story of Totobi-Quakyi, Nsamankow Press et al, authenticates this dictum.
And it came to pass that a student, Vida Ofori, a student of the then Institute of Professional Studies (IPS) now University of Professional Studies Accra (UPSA) lost her life when Totobi-Quakyi unleashed the awesome powers of the state on students of the tertiary institution merely on demonstration. It earned him an unenviable footnote in the dark history of national security in the aftermath of independence.
We plead with the family of this lady to pardon us for reminding them of what they endured at the hands of a man with the heart of a Russian KGB agent and demeanour of a Gestapo.
Enter the Kumepreko demonstration. He was still in charge: he wielded the power to order hoodlums recruited into the security services to shoot and kill any person merely suspected of being a thorn in the flesh of government. Blood was spilled and a life lost. Those were terrible days, the embers of the so-called revolution still active, the roll call of the dead and missing still fresh in the memories of family members.
It was a demonstration to which Totobi-Quakyi responded with the crackling of gunfire by hoodlums in uniform, remnants of the cadre system. It was so inhuman it made headline on news bulletins across the world. Ghanaians were held spellbound having never seen a thing like this after the 28 February 1948 Osu Crossroads Shooting.
As National Security Minister, the only experience this man can impart his successors, if they want to be so schooled, is how to brutally suppress demonstrations and lie through the teeth in shameful propaganda.