Minority demand's Akufo-Addo's resignation over Osu Castle 'militia'

The Minority in Parliament is demanding an immediate resignation of President Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo over the Joy News documentary that alleges that the Osu Christianborg Castle, an annex of the President’s office, is being used for the training of a militia group.

According to the Minority, the government’s complicity in the latest expose was unquestionable hence its demand for the President’s resignation.

At a press conference in Accra Friday, the Minority members said they would trigger other legal actions if President Akufo-Addo fail to step down.

“We insist that Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo must resign as President of the Republic with immediate effect. The President has lost every moral authority to continue to occupy that high office after having been caught” in the action, the Minority observed", the Deputy Minority Leader, James Klutse Avedzi, said.

He urged the Inspector General of Police (IGP) to “immediately, that’s before close of day [Friday], carry out a swoop and arrest the leaders and members of De-Eye Group militia.”

The investigative piece aired on Thursday evening showed the heavily built men undergoing drills under the command of former personal security to the President amid alleged admission of government endorsement of their activities.

Related: VIDEO: Joy News 'militia" documentary misleading - Government

Open investigation

Mr Avedzi urged the state to take urgent steps to reclaim the offices and other state properties in the possession of the leaders of the group.

He again called for an investigation was opened into “how a facility owned and managed by the State - the Osu Castle became a safe haven for an NPP militia.”

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The Minority caucus also wanted the training of the group immediately halted, and invited civil society organisations and faith based Organisations to assume a prominent facilitation role in the proposed talks to disband all party militias because it could not trust the government to do so in good faith.

President Akufo-Addo in his 2019 State of the Nation Address in Parliament last Month expressed his abhorrence to vigilantism and called on the two leading parties, the New Patriotic Party (NPP) and the National Democratic Congress (NDC) to come together to find solution to the cancer of vigilantism.

Mr Avedzi said the content of the documentary is not only unsettling, “it makes for grim commentary. It shakes the very foundations of the notion that Ghana remains a stable democratic State. That façade appears to have been stripped bare.

"Since the airing of ‘The Militia in the Heart of the Nation,’ the Minority continued; “dark clouds now hang over our dear nation as many ponder deeply on the direction of our country under the duplicitous and deceptive leadership of President Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo.”

Mr Avedzi said more shocking was the revelation that the group had been allocated two offices at the Castle where it used one as a secretariat and the other as an office for Commander Nana Wireko Addo when government was yet to provide complete office accommodation for some ministers.

In the view of the

Though is seized to be he seat of Government only in 2013, the Minority contends that the Osu Castle “is a nerve centre for the functions of the executive arm of Government.

“This point is further buttressed by the fact that at least four Ministers of State at the Office of the President namely: Dr. Mustapha Hameed who is the Minister of State responsible for Inner City and Zongo Development, Hawa Koomson who is responsible for Special Development Initiatives, Professor Gyan Baffour who is responsible for Planning and Minister of State at the Presidency Rockson Bukari all function from the Castle.”

Ghanaians, the Minority observed were not oblivious of how similar militias in other countries mutated into full blown terrorist organizations that now haunt those nations and beyond including the politicians who birthed them.

The Minority decried what is said was the creeping culture of intolerance and vicious attacks perpetrated by officials and agents of the Government on journalists whose only crime was that they were pursuing their profession without fear or favour.

“We condemn this negative culture which Anas Aremeyaw Anas has been subjected to in recent days and caution that Manasseh Azure Awuni should not be made to suffer the same predicament following this world-class courageous and impressive undercover reportage. These are journalists who at the very least, deserve high praise and not character assassination and mudslinging from a lynch mob of enslaved party loyalists.

“if all our demands are not met in the shortest possible time, we shall avail ourselves to other constitutional avenues to achieve our noble objectives in the national interest”, Mr Avedzi said.

Minority reacts to Joy News' documentary protest at the recent investigative piece on an alleged vigilante group at the Castle.