
Editor-in-Chief of the New Crusading Guide
newspaper, Abdul Malik Kweku Baako, has stated that though he frowns
upon insults on the person of the President, he thinks there is no big
deal with the phenomenon because Mills is not the first president to
have suffered such attacks.
According to him, many past
presidents and presidential candidates – like ex-president Kufuor and
Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo Addo – have had to put up with insults and harsh
criticisms at one point or the other.
Therefore, he viewed it as an act of hypocrisy for anyone to cry foul when the president was insulted.
Malik Baako made these comments when he was contributing to discussions on Peace FM’s news analysis programme Kokrokoo Wednesday.
The
New Patriotic Party (NPP) Member of Parliament for Assin North, Ken
Agyepong, has been heavily critisised for referring to President John
Evans Atta Mills as the ‘number one thief’ during a rally held by the
party last weekend.
Although Mr Baako saw that as unusual he
acknowledged that it was wrong for anybody to label the president as
such because: “You may not like the man, you may not even like his
politics but [the] office he [currently] occupies comes with a certain
dignity.”
He called for a total ceasefire on the politics of
insults and added that: “No matter what is happening there (in
government) there is a certain borderline [we must not] cross."
He
however accused President Mills of hypocrisy for failing to rein-in his
appointees who constantly attack the integrity of members of the
opposition parties.
“There are people in his (Mills) own camp
who are insulting Kufuor, Nana Addo and the rest; who are using all
sorts of dubious means to assassinate the character of Kufuor [and] Nana
Akufo Addo and other members of the NPP right at the presidency ,”
Baako charged.
“Some holding ministerial or deputy ministerial positions, doesn’t he hear? …So where is hypocrisy coming from?“
He
added that “I’m against that description [thief on the person of the
president]…but that doesn’t mean we [Ghanaians] have the requisite
competence or quality that must come with [an elected] leadership.