Alfred Agbesi Woyome
Last week ended on an eerie note for our country. In an open show of opprobrium for the lawful arrest and detention of Alfred Agbesi Woyome over a financial scandal, a powerful delegation of Volta Region chiefs called on the detained man, seething with anger.
As if the show of crude and rude solidarity to a man they described as their kinsman and a prominent executive of the ruling National Democratic Congress (NDC) was not enough, they went further to ask the President to interfere with the course of justice.
Their demand that the President considers the political and local standing of the man who has swindled the state of a wanton amount of money and order his release smacks of something sinister and obscene.
Little wonder therefore that when news about the visit and the “release Woyome” demand by the Togbes became public, it was greeted by a widespread and almost thunderous condemnation.
A general appreciation and even association with heroes is a normal societal phenomenon as witnessed in how celebrities are held in high esteem and sometimes to the point of adulation.
When, however, one of our kind breaches what we all agree should serve as our code of laws to regulate our conduct and therefore differentiate us from the lesser animals in the fauna, we should be bold to let the applicable law deal with the situation. That is the mark of a civilized society.
We find it amazing that the chiefs would prefer a selective treatment for a man who has allegedly swindled the whole nation to a level unsurpassed in the annals of local financial misdemeanour.
In a country bound together by a common destiny and desire for progress, a little indiscretion as exhibited by the chiefs who have displayed their partisan lineage, can alter the status quo. Their action is an infectious social contagion which, when replicated by other ethnic groups, can spell doom for Mother Ghana.
Villainous characters should be chastised and not sympathized with.
The visit and subsequent “release him” demand by the chiefs, which were fraught with ethnocentric underpinnings, have fueled a perception that some traditional rulers are steeped in this social aberration.
We would not want to be drawn into this line of polemics, suffice it to state however that the chiefs, by their action, have provided cause for their names to be dragged in the mud.
Are they saying that the matter should be brushed under the carpet and the current investigation aborted because the suspect hails from their part of the country and that they have partaken in the ill-gotten largesse?
We are not in a position to pronounce Woyome guilty. In fact, it is not for us to do so but one thing is however certain; the state has lost a mammoth amount of money through fraudulent means to someone suspected to be Alfred Woyome. This is what has triggered questions and a probe. Are we asking for too much?
The chiefs could have taken a cue from their representatives in Parliament who had earlier expressed indignation at the manner in which Woyome was arrested. That was anyway a veneer of their underlying anger that their kinsman, a rich one for that matter, has been arrested.
For them, the scandal is a trivial matter. Such conducts are not factors of nation-building and those who engage in them can only be paying lip-service to the country they call theirs.
What is iniquitous should be regarded as such and condemned regardless of ethnocentric underpinnings.
We are ruled by laws and not men; unless the Volta Chiefs who have told the rest of the country their political colours want to tell us that they want to return to medieval times, they had better apologise to the rest of the country. Is it the case that our chiefs are now openly flouting the provisions of article 276 of the 1992 constitution, which prevents them from taking part in active politics?
The chieftaincy institution has never been so desecrated and nation-building threatened as witnessed last Friday- a sad day indeed, in our contemporary history.
