Dean of the University of Ghana School of Law, Prof. Raymond Atuguba, has asserted that the governing New Patriotic Party’s (NPP) quest to ‘break the 8’ is anchored on seven points.
Speaking at the 4th Triennial Conference of the Ghana Studies Association (GSA) under the theme “Ghana at Crossroads” and held at the University for Development Studies in Tamale on July 18, Professor Atuguba noted that the ‘break the 8’ agenda by the party is not for continuity on the path of development.
He said, the NPP was fixated on extending its eight-year governance to protect the corrupt wealth some of its officials had allegedly gotten.
In furtherance of this, Professor Atuguba said the NPP in its bid has been buying out other political parties and critical voices in the country to remain silent on issues of national interest.
Read Prof Atuguba’s 7 characteristics of ‘Break the 8’ agenda
First, a concerted attempt to obliterate or at least devalue, including in the basic textbooks that we use to teach our children the history of our nation, the central role of Dr. Kwame Nkrumah in the nationalist struggle and the early years of national reconstruction and his enduring legacy in Ghana, Africa and around the world, and to replace that with a very inadequate alternative, their Dr. J. B. Danquah-I will euphemistically call this project, “The Founders of the Nation Project”;
The Second Project, which they euphemistically call, “The Financial Clean-up Project”, involves the identification, discipline, emasculation, strangulation, and destruction of every source of financial power, other than theirs, at a scale and pace never seen in our democratic governance, so that in 2024, they would be able to financially determine the contestants and winners of the elections, in the monied democracy that we run;
Thirdly, the project involves the capture and buy-out of all other parties, and some elements of the major opposition party, again, with financial incentives at a scale never seen in the last 30 years, so that these parties and elements will be at least neutral, and at worse attack dogs of the opposition, and ready and willing to call the 2024 Election for the stooge;
Fourth, an insistence that at the micro, meso and of course the macro levels of the public services, there is unalloyed obeisance to the political leadership for good or for bad, extending to formal and informal attempts to replace anyone suspected of even the least disloyalty, dismally reflecting in the removal, for the first time in our political history of Vice-Chancellors of public universities, purely on suspicion of party-political disloyalty;
The fifth element of “Break the 8” involves the incubation of parallel security forces, some forcefully integrated into some regular forces, and some not, and the use of these guns for hire for all and any forms of physical violence; culminating, some have argued, in their deployment for Election 2024, against the backdrop of real or orchestrated evidence of terrorism and violent extremism, for the purpose of restricting freedoms, terrorizing the opposition and robbing the Election;
Significantly, project “break the 8” also involves the targeting of all critical national voices, including those in academia, media, civil society, and even faithbased organizations, either buying them out, that is, paying them for their silence, or hounding them using the instrument of state force such as the security services, the military and the police, and the instruments of the administrative state, such as the tax authorities and the regulatory authorities, and also aimed at ensuring their silence or support, when the call on Election 2024 is made on 8th December that year; and
Seventh and finally, a brazen urge to do whatever is necessary to achieve set goals, no matter the cost to human lives, to the national economy, and to institutions build over a century and a half, including the most extreme methods of removing an Electoral Commissioner from office on trumped up charges, the first in our democratic history, and the storming of a sitting court to free political operatives and apparatchiks, in order to send a very clear message that the agenda will be accomplished by hook or crook, fair or foul, even if it leaves no man or woman standing, and all this is mediated and spurred on by a certain toxic masculinity that has taken aggressive capture of our politics.
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