The Bono Regional Council of Elders of the New Patriotic Party (NPP) has condemned the arrest and prosecution of its Chairman, Kwame Baffoe, popularly known as Abronye DC.
The Council is appealing to the National Peace Council (NPC), the Christian Council of Ghana, and civil society organisations to intervene, describing the development as a political witch-hunt by government against the NPP.
An Accra Circuit Court on Friday, September 12, remanded Abronye DC into police custody for one week. He was arrested on Monday, September 8, for what the police described as “offensive conduct conducive to the breach of public peace.”
Speaking to the Ghana News Agency (GNA) on the sidelines of a meeting in Sunyani, Mr. Kofi Kyeremeh, Chairman of the Bono Regional Council of Elders, described the arrest and prosecution as “an affront to the repeal of the criminal libel law and the freedom of expression.”
He stressed that while the Council does not endorse politics of insults, Ghana’s democracy guarantees the right to free expression.
“If the government wants to bring sanity to the media space, then we put it to them that some supporters of the National Democratic Congress (NDC) have said worse things than what our chairman said,” Mr. Kyeremeh stated.
Nana Atta Afena, another member of the Council, also criticised the police for what he called the “Rambo style” arrest, describing it as an attempt by government to intimidate the NPP.
“Our chairman’s arrest and prosecution are unacceptable in this era of multi-party democracy and freedom of speech. If the NDC and its government have forgotten, we want to remind them that it was the NPP that repealed the criminal libel law in 2001, and we will not sit back and allow any machinations to intimidate us,” he said.
Nana Afena further called on the NPC, the Ghana Catholic Bishops’ Conference, and civil society groups to resist what he described as a ploy by the NDC to silence the NPP, warning that such actions would not serve Ghana’s democratic progress.
Source: GNA
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