Anybody who presumed the President of Ghana was going to sign the private member’s bill on the Promotion of Proper Human Sexual Rights and Ghanaian Family Values (LGBTQ+ Bill) when it was eventually passed and presented for his assent has not studied the political biography of Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo before and upon his assumption of office as President.
I had no doubt in my mind that no admonishment from any quarters, religious, cultural, social, or otherwise would persuade Nana Akufo-Addo to sign it when presented to him. Those who had conversations with me long before Parliament began to consider and pass the Bill will confirm my position on this matter.
As I told my interlocutors then, “self-preservation is the first law of nature” and Nana Akufo-Addo will be committing suicide to assent the LGBTQ+ Bill passed by Parliament into law. Nana Akufo-Addo’s long game, the aura he has built around himself as a democrat in the Western tradition, and all the ingratiation efforts he has invested in, will come to nought should he assent to the Bill upon passage. The fact that other citizens closely watching the Ghanaian political scene knew the difficulty the Bill was going to face when it got to the desk of the President was articulated by no less a person than Minority Leader Ato Forson.
Myjoyonline.com reported on 7 February 2024 while the LGBTQ+ Bill was under consideration in Parliament that Parliament had misgivings whether the President will assent to the bill when it is passed by Parliament. These misgivings led the Minority Leader Ato Forson to have stated that:
“There are rumours out there that after passage, the president did not sign it into law. However, the constitution envisioned this, and it said the House will have to use a certain approach which is the House using the two-thirds majority of members to approve it. So let us deal with the first hurdle and get it passed and then send it to the President and if he fails to assent, we will take a decision.”
The LGBTQ+ Bill has now allegedly been passed even though the public and electorate is being informed that the proponents of the bill and the Speaker have as yet to be presented with the final bill as compiled by the Parliamentary Draft Person for presentation to the President for his possible assent. Even before the Bill is forwarded by the Speaker of Parliament for the assent of the President proponents and the opposers of the Bill, with the President openly on the side of the opponents of the Bill, have stated where they stand on whether or not the Bill should be assented.
I am not surprised that while the Bill was purely a matter being passed through Parliament and the saying that “what happens in Parliament is a closed book and the courts will not interfere in the internal working of Parliament”, the Supreme Court has already been invited to the Bar of politics to decide on a Bill which has not left Parliament to the Presidency. The two major political parties in Ghana, the New Patriotic Party (NPP) in Government and the National Democratic Congress (NDC) in opposition have so politicized the constitutional democracy of this country in such a manner that the only denominator for truth is who can lie his way into power at the next elections. The human political actors on both sides of the political divide, including the arms of government, are so fixated on power that they find it difficult to reach compromises necessary in every democracy for the substance of constitutional rule.
While the NDC wishes to form the next government using the outcome of the LGBTQ+ Bill as one of the crux of its political campaign strategy, the NPP understands the implications of the political game being played with the Private Members Bill largely championed by the NDC. I can bet that the debate about whether or not to assent to the LGBTQ+ Bill will prolong up to and after the 2024 elections without the Promotion of Proper Human Sexual Rights and Ghanaian Family Values Bill coming into force as an enactment.
Nana Akufo-Addo will not commit suicide in the few months remaining for his Presidency to end and his hope of handing over to his chosen surrogate. Nana Akufo-Addo has come a long way since the bad press attributed to the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and the West Africa Commission on Drugs (WACD) of allegations against him for taking donation from a drug dealer brother-in-law whose seized assets he allegedly returned as the Attorney-General for his political survival. Nana Akufo-Addo reinvented himself. Attempts to use these allegations by his political opponents in the 2016 presidential election failed, and he became President of Ghana. He has since rehabilitated himself, placed his administration within the obit of the geopolitical West and has curried favours with them.
The problem with the endemically partisan and divided parasitic political elite and middle-class Ghanaian upon whom the sustenance of constitutionalism, democracy and the rule of law depends is its incremental development of emotional and ideological attachment to secular, religious and cultural ideologies which affects their bank of knowledge when assessing objective reality and phenomenon. The self-interest of the parasitic political elite, and the middle class has come to triumph over community, societal and national interest. Otherwise, the fact that Nana Akufo-Addo will not assent to any bill that offends the sensibilities of the friends he has cultivated in the geopolitical West has been lying in plain view since 7 January 2017.
Nana Akufo-Addo had to reinvent himself by ingratiation to those who previously considered him a beneficiary of drug trafficking and money laundering. Why does anybody think most of the policies of the Akufo-Addo government are western-centred? The profuse outward display of sorrow and mourning upon the death of Prince Philip, and the solicitation by the President to be invited to Queen Elizabeth II’s funeral when he went to sign the book of condolence at the British High Commission were intended for both Ghanaian and international consumption of fidelity to our colonial masters – the typical Comprador behaviour of the Gold Coast born Ghanaian. What of when Nana Akufo-Addo arranged on a private visit to the United Kingdom to meet the newly crowned King Charles III and had the encounter splashed in the Ghanaian media?
What does the political elite and middle class call the television broadcast of President Nana Akufo-Addo sitting before a US Secretary of State, not the President of the United States, and bringing the reputation of a neighbouring country, Burkina Faso, into disrepute by claiming without proof that: “Today, Russian mercenaries are on our northern border. Burkina Faso has now entered into an arrangement to go along with Mali in employing the Wagner forces there.”?
Ghanaian patriots and nationalists who seek the sovereignty of our country free from geopolitical interferences from the contending hegemons for world supremacy know that the northern border from Kulungugu/Widana to Hamile is being dotted with security barracks and encampments in the name of fighting terrorism and encroachment of undesirable elements from our northern neighbouring countries. Hopefully, these are not intended as the basis for other foreign security establishments to secure a permanent partnership with Ghana without Parliamentary approval in the geopolitical fight for world hegemony. In all these things, one cannot objectively overlook the intention of the opposite hegemons of using Africa as a springboard for geopolitical hegemony.
Where do we place the outspoken support Nana Akufo-Addo has displayed of partisanship in the Russian-Ukraine war or Special Military Operations depending on which side one supports; and the Israeli-Palestinian war of attrition? The fact that Ghana under the Nana Akufo-Addo regime has ceased to be nonaligned and become partisan in international politics just as it has divided the country cannot be doubted by anyone applying the methodology of conducting biographical research of Nana Akufo-Addo’s presidency using a qualitative philosophy and methods of research approach.
A digression! Whilst the NPP is thinking forward about how to carry its supporters along in finding a decent way to avoid committing itself to the LGBTQ+ Bill, the NDC is busy alienating some of its core revolutionary cadre supporters by mortgaging the legacy of its leader and founder, Jerry John Rawlings to the Ahwois and their cohorts who want to hijack the NDC from the Rawlings’ tradition and have imposed their surrogate, Naana Jane Opoku Agyeman as the running mate on their cocooned Presidential candidate without adequate consultation and consensus.
The perception by those who have gone along with the Ahwois and their cohort as the current owners of the NDC in the hope that they can mobilize cadres of the 31 December Revolution to change things in 2028 should the NDC manage to assume power in 2024 would regret their folly in acceding to this imposition intended to obliterate the image of Jerry John Rawlings from the history of the NDC in favour of the authors who wrote and endorsed falsehoods intended to betray President Rawlings in his lifetime and for posterity.
What the NDC needs now for its viability is an open and honest dialogue with the cadres of the 31 December Revolution, its former appointees including all former Members of Parliament, and the grassroots that sustained it since 1992 and not arrogant antagonism and covert claim to ownership of the NDC by the Ahwois and their cohorts.
Meanwhile, the NPP’s Attorney-General has smartly detailed in the Daily Graphic of 29 February 2024 how the country was saved tens of trillions of cedis arising out of the President’s SONA from the African Automobile Company Limited against the then Ministry of Employment and Manpower and the Attorney-General in judgment debt settlement originating from 2009. This brings to the fore again the issue of the Ministry of Local Government and African Automobile Limited’s Gallopers unconstitutional judgment debt settlement agreements in July 2011.
Ghanaians await the response of the current owners of the NDC who were in charge of entering into those transactions. My answer to the unconstitutional conduct in the settlement with the same African Automobile Company Limited on the Gallopers contract in July 2011 was clearly stated and reported by Modern Ghana and can be found on: There Is Massive Rot At A-G’s Office – Martin Amidu (modernghana.com).
I have from my experiential learning and knowledge of the Akufo-Addo regime written about his long game since he lost the 2008 presidential election and promised that never under his watch will he allow his successor from the NPP to lose an election. The developed countries of the world with all their sophisticated security and intelligence apparatus are daily accusing each other of interfering in the electoral processes of each other.
Only the blind cannot see that if these hegemons can interfere in the elections of each other for geopolitical reasons then elections in developing countries are easier to manipulate by either hegemon depending on the stranglehold they have over particular developing country regimes and the protection of turf.
Nana Akufo-Addo is too clever and cynical to alienate the powers he has painstakingly cultivated and sold Ghana to during his tenure in office on the polarizing politicized issue of assenting to the “Promotion of Proper Human Sexual Rights and Ghanaian Family Values Bill” to jeopardize his long game to break the eight.
Martin A. B. K. Amidu
March 6, 2024
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