You Cannot “Silence” the NDC Hit-list, Sucker!

As usual, I read Mr. Kwabena Sarfo's rather desultory and piddling article presumptuously titled “ 'Hit-list' Emanated from Danquah Institute” (Modernghana.com 12/20/08) with decided contempt. In his “liner note,” as it were, the writer facilely claims that his supposed expertise in Internet Technology (IT) enabled him to trace the IP address purportedly used in generating the alleged NDC hit-list to the Danquah Institute, the supposed vehicle of a so-called Akyem Mafia. I thought the Ghanaian version of the Mafia was of Anlo-Ewe origins and headquartered in Dzelukope, with its command post in the Ridge section of Accra, to be certain.

In any case, what is intriguing here, however, is that while he claims to have traced the alleged NDC Hit-list to the Danquah Institute, nonetheless, Mr. Sarfo is curiously unable to identify precisely which computer at the Institute had been used to generate the allegedly phantom hit-list. His infantile ruse, therefore, is to call on the Ghanaian police to carry out a raid on the premises of the Danquah Institute in order to get to the bottom of the matter.

The preceding is nothing short of the downright silly, criminal and at once preposterous. First of all, the writer himself acknowledges that he, in fact, illegally used a “hacking software” to track down the supposed source of the NDC hit-list. If so, then it is rather Mr. Kwabena Sarfo who ought to immediately surrender himself, as well as whoever collaborated with this self-styled sleuth, or Internet detective, to the Ghanaian police, in order for criminal charges to be promptly preferred against him/them.

Secondly, the writer does not tell his readers where he got the e-mail message allegedly containing the names of NDC death-squad targets, or prospective victims, in order for him to harbor the wild and patently chimerical impression that he has, indeed, exposed the staff of the Danquah Institute as the real culprit.

Thirdly, even assuming that, indeed, the alleged source of the NDC hit-list were the Danquah Institute, as Mr. Sarfo imperiously and smugly claims, still, how could our “IT detective” be air-tightly certain that it was not a criminal posse of NDC operatives that simulated the entire enterprise in order to make it seem to be emanating from the Danquah Institute?

In other words, Mr. Kwabena Sarfo's supposedly exposé tactic is all too pedestrian and typical NDC gimmickry aimed at cynically deflecting attention from a real culprit with longstanding evidentiary track-record and, instead, put the blame squarely on the potential victim.

Needless to say, just as there exists Internet-Technology hacking software out there on the global market, there is also IT-hacking simulator software that can, indeed, make it falsely appear that it is actually the target-victim who is perpetrating the alleged crime.

Try harder and more plausibly and intelligently, Mr. Sarfo. And by the way, Merry Christmas, Sir IT Detective! May the New Year make you a better Ghanaian citizen and a more constructive sleuth.

Patriotically yours,
Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.
Nassau Community College of the State University of New York

Garden City, Long Island
Dec. 20, 2008