Captain Joel Sowu (rtd) has condemned the lynching of Capt Maxwell A. Mahama of the 5 Battalion of Infantry who was the Commander to a Special Military Detachment at Denkyira Boase in the Upper Denkyira West district.
He has equally condemned rioting by the youth of Somanya in the Eastern Region which resulted in the torching of a police car and the vandalisation of the office of the Electricity Company of Ghana (ECG).
Both the lynching and rioting were believed to have been instigated by assemblymen.
Capt Mahama was lynched on suspicion that he was an armed robber after a group of residents from whom he asked for directions during a Monday dawn jogging session spotted a pistol on him.
Capt. Mahama, who was not in any military attire at the time, was later attacked by residents allegedly organised by the Assemblyman of the area, who pounced on him with crude weapons including cement blocks and clubs, killing him in the process, despite desperate attempts to convince his assailants that he was not a criminal.
In the Somanya incident, the arrest of Assemblyman Ebenezer Adamtey, who organised demonstrations against the ECG, caused the youth of the area to attack the police to demand his immediate release.
In the view of Capt Sowu (rtd), President Nana Akufo-Addo must intervene immediately. “What is happening to our assemblymen? Why? They are supposed to be on the side of the law, so, if women call you that they suspect somebody to be an armed robber, do you just call people to lynch him? What authority have you got as an assemblyman to order people to lynch him? Are we in a mob-rule situation? I think the President would have to come hard on these two people [assemblymen] ... he has to come hard on it because the code of conduct of our assemblymen and public officers will have to be higher than the ordinary men because if they are not disciplined and they don’t have that self-discipline and self-control and they can just think that because ‘I’ve been given power, I’ve been appointed by the President, therefore, I’m the President or I’m the law unto myself’, their minds have to be disabused of this as quickly as possible before this country degenerates into mob rule,” he said.
Source: Classfmonline
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Wow! Not even under incompetent mahama, did we see lynching of a military captain. We now have law and order man and so called competent them but is chaos and anarchy everywhere. The competent team should sit up before their president plane is hijacked by angry youth.
What is going on is the byproduct of the stuopidity displayed by delta force and invisible force and subsequently being left off the hook for political reasons. If some group of people could go to court and release criminals and go Scot free, why won't the citizens take the law into their own hands and lynch military officers. What the police and judiciary are doing under nana Addo would eventually catch up with nana Addo himself. In the near future I would be surprised if nana Addo or Barwumia or their wives are pelted with stones by angry mob if they fail to deliver. The government has allowed so much impunity and the effect is what we are seeing. It is high time that if nana Addo believed in the rule of law, he should forget about party nun sense and begin to let the law work even against his own supporters who flout the laws of Ghana. No one is above the law. Impunity results in break down of law and order.
Please for your information, it is not the president that appoints assemblymen. Their actions are criminal and must be dealt with by the appropriate law enforcement agencies. It has nothing to do with the president please.