The NPP is watching its own son being prepared for slaughter. And the party is doing nothing.
The trial of Bernard Antwi Boasiako (Wontumi) is not a legal proceeding. It is a coordinated political foreclosure. The time for private whispers is over.
Yesterday’s dismissal of the stay of proceedings at the High Court is the final alarm. While Wontumi is ordered to open his defence for the Samreboi concession, the “Syndicate” continues to mine with state-sponsored impunity. The state has not criminalised galamsey. It has securitised it – converting ecocide into a sovereign franchise.
Justice Audrey Kocuvie-Tay’s courtroom is not corrupt. It is terrified. The fear is not in the rulings; it is in the atmospheric pressure of the regime’s history. It is the lingering ghost of Justice Cecilia Koranteng-Addo, snatched from her breastfeeding child. It is the memory of the Kpandai rerun sham, where the High Court attempted to subvert the sovereign will before the Supreme Court quashed that quackery in January. This regime does not need to issue threats; its pedigree of intimidation does the talking.
In the galamsey belt, the law has been replaced by a tax on destruction. Almost every District Assembly now collects an “administrative levy” on the death of our rivers – GH₵10,000 per excavator. The same changfang the law bans is the same changfang the state monetises. The DCEs who collect this blood money are not in the dock. They are at their posts, counting the harvest, while Wontumi is prosecuted for a single hole in the earth. This is not a systemic failure. It is the System’s Architecture.
GoldBod is the state’s smelter. The ore is our rivers. The forest is the libation.
It has become the primary off-taker of gold whose origin no one dares to verify. The same government that hounds Wontumi in Samreboi signs landmark deals to refine one metric tonne of gold weekly. Where is this gold coming from? It is the processed remains of our scorched forests and poisoned waters. The state has learned that it is more profitable to tax the ecocide than to stop it.
The law is binary. It is either a shield for the Republic or a weapon for the elite. On July 16, 2025, the Attorney General ordered EOCO to investigate Joseph Yamin. Nearly a year later, the file is a museum piece. No arrest. No charge. No trial. He walks free under 24/7 state protection. If the law cannot reach the NDC National Organiser, why is it sprinting after the NPP Ashanti Chairman? The answer is not in the statutes. The answer is in the Ledger of Vengeance.
The NPP must understand the arithmetic of survival. Since the dawn of the Fourth Republic, no NDC administration has successfully jailed a high-profile NPP figure. Not one. They won in 2008 on the propaganda of “thieves” and spent eight years jailing nobody. They won in 2024 on the same playbook. Now, they must prove their rhetoric, or their political currency becomes fiat and worthless.
The NDC’s base is hungry. They have been fed a decade of vitriol. They want a scalp in Nsawam to validate the lies they were told. Wontumi is not being tried for a crime; he is being prepared as a ceremonial libation to satisfy a base that has received only press releases instead of blood.
The NPP cannot afford the luxury of “legalism.” This is a political war of attrition. The battlefield is the hunger of the NDC base. If you allow Wontumi to be liquidated while Yamin walks and DCEs collect their “Ecocide Tax,” you are not just losing a Chairman. You are confirming the NDC’s propaganda as truth. That message will outlive this trial. It will become the permanent architecture of your defeat.
The NDC protected Ato Forson. They shielded Richard Jakpa. They deployed every parliamentary and political lever to ensure their own did not sleep in Nsawam. Yet the NPP watches its most potent Ashanti general being led to the slaughterhouse alone. Political capital that is not deployed is not capital – it is a relic.
The Republic is no longer watching the trial. The Republic is auditing the prosecution.
Acquit the man. Or indict the Syndicate.
The Stool is watching. The ancestors are watching. The Republic is watching.
The “Living World” of politics will not be fooled by the “Dusty Law” of selective vengeance. And the dead will not forgive those who stood silent while their own was offered as libation.
J. A. Sarbah
