President Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo(inset) launching the Inter University Quiz Debate. Photo: Michael Ayeh
The President yesterday opened up his administration to Ghanaians with another encounter with the media who quizzed him on a wide range of issues bordering on corruption, security, the economy, illegal mining popularly known as galamsey–all these issues border on the lives of Ghanaians.
The Ghanaian Times is very much reassured that the President has dissociated his administration from political vigilantism and condemned other acts of lawlessness perpetrated under the guise of a political party.
Describing such behaviours as “shameful”, the President added “I believe there is no longer any argument that criminal behaviour wears no political colours, and is solely to be dealt with by the police. I pray that we have seen the last of it. We are continuously working to ensure that it does not recur, that we uphold the rule of law”.
We believe that the President is now loud and clear and the buck stops with the security agencies, especially the police, who are mandated to maintain law and order for the stability of the country.
It will be shameful, to borrow the words of the President, for the police to look on while these unacceptable behaviours go on, especially after change in government.
Some politically zealous persons, after change of government, take the law into their own hands to seize toilets, lorry parks, state assets like Metro Mass Transport, drag legitimate occupants of public office out of their offices with brute force. By these conducts they bring the government business in disarray.
Very strangely, and rather surprising, these political zealots perpetrate these acts of violence with impunity, sometimes in the full glare of the police.
And, perhaps out of the fear of the unknown, sometimes out of hypocrisy, the police have failed to act in order not to step on the toes of some powerful persons, so as not to lose their jobs.
This creeping culture of political hooliganism during change of government must stop; we cannot play the ostrich with national security!
In fact, our democratic development is always on the radar of the international community who are scoring marks for us, to determine how rule of law and other democratic values are playing out in the country.
Indeed, the international investor community gauges how safe a country is before they venture their moneys and certainly political hooliganism and other acts of social upheaval would certainly repulse them.
Much so, our relations with the global community, like the United Nations enjoins us to uphold the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights and other fundamental values of peace, security and respect for one another.
We commend the President for his forthrightness on this sensitive issue. So the ball is in the court of the security agencies to act and act with dispatch.
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