President Mills at a meeting with representatives from the Methodist Church at the Castle yesterday condemned the growing incidence of politics of insult in the country saying “now we’ve got to a stage where people say anything regardless of whether it is true or not. Now my worry is the kind of lesson that we’re teaching the young ones who are coming up, that you use intemperate language, you subject yourself to verbal violence and all that without due regard for the right of other people.”
His comments, the first ever since the practice gained widespread attention in recent times, came on the back of the arrest and subsequent release of an NPP youth Activist, John Kumah who was arrested for allegedly calling the President a homosexual.
Speaking on Multi TV’s current affairs program PM: EXPRESS which discussed “Politics of insults: An abuse of freedom of expression”?, Mr. Asante noted that the best way for the President to nib the situation in the bud is to set an example with some of the government officials who often engage in the practice.
According to him, politicians must be able to speak out against issues they claim they do not support.
“My philosophy with any politician is that when you don’t speak out against something you believe, you claim, your rhetoric is that you don’t subscribe to personality attacks and so on and yet when one of your party members goes out there and they’re using all kinds of language, intemperate language and you don’t say anything then for me passively, you’re basically condoning it, you’re accepting that that is part of the political culture.”
He added that “when people from the President’s own stable, even the Castle, use this kind of language, for people who are being paid from the public purse, that kind of behaviour is a straight dismissal. They can’t go and represent Ghana if they speak like that and the president should not tolerate that because they are representing us as a people so when the President doesn’t take that signal then he also fails to gather that moral authority to demand it from others”.
His comment was supported by the Executive Director of the Centre for Policy Research, Dr. Michael Whyte Kpessa who said “the President and perhaps his Cabinet need to take a closer look at some of the people within their own caucus. Henceforth anybody who goes into public domain and insults [or] sets a bad example should be fired and I think that that will send a clear message not only to government officials but also show clearly to younger people in this country that insult is not something that we should be encouraging in our political space”.
Referring to reports that the President ordered the release of Mr. Kumah after he had been arrested by the Police, Dr. Kpessa noted that the President “may have set a very bad example for all of us with his intervention in the works of the security agencies that decided that there is an issue here that they needed to pursue”.
He explained that “we must learn not to interfere in the work of the institutions that are supposed to be autonomous and independent in this country. It doesn’t matter if you are the President, the Speaker of Parliament or a Supreme Court Judge.”
He added that “the Police Service deemed it appropriate to investigate and deal with this matter. We should have allowed them to deal with the matter to its logical conclusion. The President may have intervened on maybe compassionate grounds or because maybe he wants to be seen as usual as the person who encourages free speech and everything but at the end of the day, it sets a bad example it shows clearly that there is an interference in the institutions of state and I think that we need to move past that so that we can create a clear impression that these institutions, particularly the security services, work on their own and are not remote controlled from any particular power centres.”
Chairman of the People’s National Convention, PNC, Alhaji Ahmed Ramadan who was also on the program blamed the incidence of politics of insults on the proliferation of serial callers who he said were funded by political parties to comment on issues in the media.
According to him, political parties who fund the serial callers and the media are equality guilty of the increasing trend of insults in the country’s politics.