Akufo-Addo Using COVID-19 to Spy On Ghanaians – Samson Anyenini

Private legal practitioner and popular radio host, Samson Lardy Anyenini has raised red flags that President Akufo Addo is clandestinely using the excuse of containing the deadly Covid-19 coronavirus to activate spy apparatuses to mount illegal surveillance on Ghanaian citizens.

According to the legal practitioner on his Newsfile programme on Saturday, the President is using the guise of the recently passed Executive Instrument (EI) 63 to achieve this new surveillance strategy.

Per section 100 of EI 63, the president could assume direct control of the telcos and determine their operations, a power which the private legal practitioner says is unconstitutional and illegal.

He explained that “this is clearly intended to get all the government could not in normal times get from telcos…All your mobile money data, transaction and wallet details, merchant code, bank details – practically your every private transaction details the telcos are being compelled to disclose to the government.”

The EI 63 has no expiration date, implying that the president’s fresh powers could still be used in normal times after the novel Coronavirus pandemic has lessened.

According to critics, since 2020 is an election year Ghana, the President could use the EI 63 to target his political opponents regarding their conversations and other things otherwise private to them.

For Mr. Anyenini, President Akufo Addo has essentially joined the growing league of “autocrats in democracies exploiting the coronavirus pandemic for selfish private ends”.

He said a Supreme Court judge, Justice Francis Kpegah in Awuni vrs. WAEC in 2004 cautioned that “[a] nation that stands by and looks on while the rights of the individual are slowly pecked at, eventually pays the ultimate price of finding its own rights eroded. Often times, the concept of ‘public interest’ and ‘national security’ have been used to undermine and subvert individual freedoms. These are words which are not infrequently on the lips of potential dictators and often used as convenient excuses for the violation of individual rights. We may accept some limitation on the fundamental rights of the individual only if it is justified and proportionate.”

Critics are reporting globally how governments are using the guise of the Covid-19 to roll back the freedoms of citizens.