Benjamin Boakye is Executive Director of the Africa Centre for Energy Policy, ACEP
• Despite existing Coronavirus regulations, top government officials have in recent times flouted the law
• The president has come up for critique after attending a packed funeral months back
• Ghana’s vistus figures are relatively lower as government moves to secure vaccines for inoculation
Benjamin Boakye, Executive Director of the Africa Centre for Energy Policy (ACEP), is concerned about how leaders in Ghana seem to get away with flouting existing regulations.
The ACEP boss was speaking with respect to recent flouting of top government officials of COVID-19 regulations put in place to curb the spread of the raging pandemic.
In submissions made on Joy FM’s News File program on Saturday, June 26, Boakye stressed that the country’s laws seem not to apply to the mighty.
“Those who are supposed to check all of us are not checking themselves. They can compel us to comply but the sad reality is that even when they are compelling the people to comply, it comes at a cost to all of us and to the state.
President Akufo-Addo recently attended a packed funeral of the ruling New Patriotic Party’s former General Secretary Sir John in the Ashanti region. Also in attendance was the vice-president Mahamudu Bawumia and the Chief Justice Kwasi Anin-Yeboah.
The Ghana Medical Association, GMA, slammed the event which it called a potential virus super-spreader.
For Mr Boakye, the actions of officials who should know better bothered on morality: “So I think morally, beyond the law, all of us; leaders, citizens, have to take that responsibility to ensure that we don’t unnecessarily endanger our people.
“And perhaps that is what is missing, because you can get away with the law when you’re a leader. The laws don’t function against the mighty in our context and that makes it easy for them to evade the law,” he said in comments monitored by GhanaWeb.
He particularly tasked the president to play his role as a prime respector of the country’s laws, if not for anything at all for purposes of posterity.
“I think we have to keep asking and pushing them to bring about that conscience in them. Those who perhaps may be advising the President at this point, he needs somebody who loves him to go to him and say to him that when history is recalled, the people who mobilise for him to do the greetings, the people who encourage him to participate in the violation of the law, their names will not be mentioned.
“This is his tenure, his time, that will be counted and I think once that conversation is had, I’m sure he’ll start processing that. In this information age you can’t easily get away with these kinds of violations when history is recalled,” he concluded.