I have already written and published several columns about the alleged desecration of the tomb of the late President John Evans Atta-Mills and had not intended to follow them up with the present one, that is, until I recently came across another news story captioned “Why Should IGP Who Was President Mills’ ADC Sit for His Grave to Be Desecrated? – Brother” Classfmonline.com 7/21/22). The caption of the article rather presumptuously presupposes that, somehow, it is the bounden duty and/or religious obligation of Dr. George Akuffo Dampare, the current Inspector-General of the Ghana Police Service, a distinguished scholar of considerable intellectual weight in his own right, to maintain a 24-hour surveillance on the burial site of the late President, the murky circumstances surrounding whose abrupt and seismic demise continue to baffle a remarkable number of the very Ghanaian taxpayers who employed him as their President and the highest elected official of the land, whose salary and perks they generously paid around the clock but whose death, 10 years on, Mr. Samuel Atta-Mills, rather scandalously and obtusely claims is none of our frigging business.
We shall shortly be taking up and discussing the news story in which the younger brother of the late President reportedly made such a morally benighted and asinine remark. Now, it is not clear to me precisely what Mr. Samuel Atta-Mills, who is also described as the National Democratic Congress’ Member of Parliament for the Komenda-Edina-Eguafo-Abirem Constituency, in the Central Region, describes Dr. Dampare as the former Aide-De-Camp of the late President. I suppose what the Edina-MP is referring to is the fact that Dr. Dampare once served as the Private and Confidential Secretary and an Official Attendant to the then Vice-President Atta-Mills. Or perhaps even while the latter was the substantive President of the Sovereign Democratic Republic of Ghana. Even so, wasn’t that position a contractual obligation and taxpayer-underwritten that ended at some point in time over a decade ago?
So, why does the younger Mr. Atta-Mills suppose for even a split-second that Dr. Dampare has been professionally frozen in time and never moved on with his life and right up on the professional ladder? You see, it is not as if Dr. Dampare was ever the privately bought and owned slave or even the privately hired butler of the late President. Rather, the present Chief of the Ghana Police Service was a bona fide public servant salaried by the Ghanaian taxpayer just like his civilian boss or superior at the time. Which, of course, is not to imply that having served as an Aide-De-Camp to the late President Atta-Mills also makes Dr. Dampare either the classmate or the professional peer of the Edina NDC-MP, as to cause Mr. Atta-Mills to suppose that he could play a condescending game of familiarity with Dr. Dampare. At any rate, what I really wanted to enlighten Mr. Atta-Mills about is the fact that, ordinarily, the cemeteries or burial grounds of the most prominent leaders of any country comes under the administrative purview of the Ghana Museums and Monuments Board or, perhaps, the Department of Parks and Gardens, which may very well be subsumed under the Ministry of Culture and Tourism, or whatever ministerial portfolio the government of the day so decides.
Even so, for a man who has been widely reported to have retorted that the circumstances under which his late brother and extant Sitting-President of the Sovereign Democratic Republic of Ghana met his death is absolutely not the business of anybody else, that is, other than the kinsfolk and the clansmen and women of the late President to be huffing and puffing over what Mr. Atta-Mills claims to be virulent desecration of the tomb of his late brother, constitutes the very height of hypocrisy of the most heinous criminality. I mean, if, really, the manner of death of the late President Atta-Mills is nobody’s damn frigging business, why should the fact of the purported desecration of the tomb of such a personality matter to any straight- or forward-thinking Ghanaian citizen?
Source: Modern Ghana
