This coming May, 2021, will be exactly six years since the brutal acid-dousing assassination of Mr. Adams Mahama, at the time of his vicious murder, the Upper-East’s Regional Chairman of the then-main opposition New Patriotic Party (NPP). The prime suspects fingered by police investigators and in the original police report released or let on to the media had Mr. Gregory Afoko, a convicted felon who had served considerable time in prison and identified as the younger brother of the extant National Chairman of the New Patriotic Party, as the lead or prime suspect. What is of overriding significance here is that Mr. Paul Awentami Afoko, the NPP’s National Chairman, would promptly step into the fray, as it were, to cop or concoct an alibi for the prime suspect in the acid-pouring murder of Mr. Mahama that would almost immediately backfire or fall apart. It was a clear-cut case of targeted or contract assassination than a mere open-and-shut case of murder in the most common and basic sense of homicide.
It had the clear markings of a surgically targeted contract assassination because it came shortly and directly on the heels of a political party factional infighting entailing a fisticuff or a scuffle in which Mr. Paul Afoko and the extant General-Secretary of the New Patriotic Party, Mr. Kwabena Agyei Agyepong, had reportedly sustained some physical injuries at a Bolgatanga hotel, where some key operatives of the regional branch of the party were holding a meeting or some sort of nondescript function, as I vividly recall. The brutal assassination of Mr. Adams Mahama was clearly deliberately orchestrated because in his alibi plea for his younger brother, Mr. Paul Afoko, who had not very long before returned to Accra, our nation’s capital, from the Bolgatanga showdown, as it shortly turned out to have been, claimed to police investigators that his brother, Gregory Afoko, could not have fatally assaulted Mr. Mahama, who would lose his fierce battle with death within two weeks, because at the very moment that police investigators claimed the brutal assault on Mr. Mahama had occurred, the fingered prime suspect, described as a farmer, was fast asleep.
Interestingly, when police investigators arrived at the Bolgatanga family home of the Afokos, Mr. Gregory Afoko who, according to the report of police investigators, pretended to have been asleep for quite some time had the evidentiary tell-tale sign of his still piping-hot motorbike of the very description provided police investigators by a dying Mr. Mahama. In his elder brother Paul’s alibi to the police, younger brother Gregory’s motorbike was supposed to be ice-cold because it had not been used for many hours. Perhaps for at least 8 to 12 hours. Then also, a second suspect had successfully taken to his heels, together with his young nursing wife who had just recently delivered a baby whom the couple, according to reliable information provided the media by police investigators, had been left behind during the process of absconding. The suspect would be apprehended about a year later in neighboring Côte d’Ivoire. I have here avoided mentioning the name of the second suspect, who was alleged to have been tipped off by the prime suspect before the police arrived to pick him up because his name has been spelled in various ways in several media reports as Asanke or Asabke Alangdi, as it is very common and typical of Ghanaian media reportage.
A third suspect was released by the court because there did not appear to exist ample judicially incriminating evidence linking him to the criminal conspiracy to savagely liquidate Mr. Adams Mahama, who was also described as a building contractor returning from the site of one of his building projects in Bolgatanga, the capital of the Upper-East Region, about midnight when he was brutally assaulted in a manner that would shortly and eventually lead to his death. Anyway, at a recently resumed hearing of the case in court, a prosecution’s witness by the name of Madam Zuweira Issaka, who claimed to have been present at the bedside of a dying Mr. Mahama, reportedly told the court that she had personally heard the victim mention the names of his assailants, an assertion that counsel for the defense are hotly challenging (See “Afoko Trial: Late Mahama Mentioned Names of Attackers to Us – Witness” Ghana News Agency (GNA) / Ghanaweb.com 3/26/21).
Our contention here is that the trial judge and the prosecutors have a bounden obligation not to let this case luridly degenerate into the sort of circus act that it well appears to be lapsing into and as has happened to innumerable court cases in the country for so long, especially with handsomely paid Afoko lawyers seeking to facilely and grotesquely reduce the gravity of the brutal slaying of Mr. Adams Mahama into the memory-vitiated wobbly credibility of a lone witness whose memory capacity must have understandably worn down considerably with time, in view of the relatively long temporal lax of six years between the date of the commission of the crime and the fits-and-starts trial of the same over approximately the same period of time. More so, when more than ample first-hand or eyewitness evidence from bedside police investigators already exists, clearly pointing to the fact that, indeed, a dying Mr. Mahama had specifically and categorically named his assailants and killers.
If there, indeed, were police investigators who visited Mr. Mahama at his deathbed prior to the clinical expiration of the victim, and we already have on record that a dying Mr. Mahama had specifically and categorically named his assailants and killers, then, even as a retired crackerjack and nationally celebrated Ghana Police Service detective cousin of this writer stated to him at the time of the brutal and fatal Mahama assault, the bedside police report is the most forensically foolproof evidence that the court has to-date.
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By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., PhD
English Department, SUNY-Nassau
Garden City, New York
March 29, 2021
E-mail: okoampaahoofe@optimum.net
