I have advised President Mahama in this very column to promptly
reassign his indescribably and inexcusably incompetent Communications
Minister to one of those boondocky health clinics on the Okwawu scarp,
where Dr. Edward Omane?Boamah grew up. He would be of much better use
in rural Okwawu, especially now that the strain of the doctors’s strike appears
to be nowhere near resolving (See “Disguised Censorship” Daily Guide /
Modernghana.com 8/14/15). 
dictatorship, only to be faced with a Mahama ?chaperoned police state, as the
afore? referenced Daily Guide editorial put it.
I hope this is not true, but if it is, indeed, true that the Mahama ?led
government of the National Democratic Congress (NDC) has imposed
restrictions on the movements of foreign media operatives in the country, then
this must be roundly condemned and fiercely fought. Short of national security
installations, only a handful of which I could readily name, such censorship is
inexcusably absurd. The Daily Guide’s editorial writer is spot on in poignantly
observing that such communist? style censorship is an eerie signal of the
government’s intention of intimidating local media operatives and
organizations into a virtual culture of the sort of silence that prevailed for
nearly twenty years under the Rawlings? led Provisional National Defense
Council (PNDC) and, subsequently, the National Democratic Congress.
The original precedence, of course, was set by the Nkrumah?led
Convention People’s Party (CPP). Legend has it that seven years after
Ghana’s declaraton of sovereignty from British colonial rule, there existed not
a single privately?owned newspaper in the country (See Dennis Austin’s
Ghanaian Politics: 1946?1960). Well, nearly two generations on, there is still
a critical mass of those who would have us return to the Gold Age of our
geopolitical freedom. President Mahama’s father, Mr. Emmanuel Adama
Mahama, served the “Osagyefo” faithfully as the first postcolonial Northern
Regional Minister; and so no one ought to be surprised that the son would be
goose?stepping the same tyrannical path as his late father’s icon and political
Indeed, one can aptly presume the younger Mr. Mahama to be set on
the same sinister political course as his father’s infamous boss. Recently,
when I came across an article bitterly lambasting Ms. Samia Yaba Nkrumah,
the Chairperson of the rump?Convention People’s Party (r?CPP), written by
the maternal nephew of one of the Show Boy’s arch?lieutenants, and making
the tired and historically extravagant claim of President Nkrumah’s being the
“Founder of Ghana,” I chuckled to myself and wondered what the reaction of
these fanatical Nkrumacrats would be, if I also wrote a rejoinder to the said
article calling Mr. Nkrumah “The Founder of Political Corruption in Modern
I know President Mahama and his Flagstaff House Abongo Boys
may have a lot to hide from the rest of us. But exactly what, besides the rank
corruption of which many of us already have far more knowledge than our
cranial sponges can handle, is not clear to yours truly. Whatever guidelines
may exist for regulating the movements of foreign journalists operating in the
country ought to be clearly spelled out in the 1992 Constitution, or ought to
have been approved by Parliament and made available to the National Media
Commission (NMC), and then to all media establishments in the country. But
guess what, the same sort of media censorship alleged to have been imposed
on foreign media operatives by the Minister of Communications existed under
the Nkrumah?led regime of the Convention People’s Party.
There are several documented instances of foreign media operatives
having been deported from the country, the most striking example of which
was the Bankole Affair. But what exactly are Dr. Omane?Boamah and his
boss trying to hide from these foreign journalists that the rest of the world
does not already know? The Stygian filth that Mr. Mahama and his Abongo
Boys do not seem to have any creative talent or the appetite for eliminating or
drastically reducing, maybe?
By Kwame Okoampa?Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.
Garden City, New York
E?mail: [email protected]
