A teacher at Ekumfi Atabanadzi in the Central Region, who was remanded for allegedly insulting the District Chief Executive of Ekumfi, Ibrahim Dawson, has been released from prison custody even before his one-week remand elapses on Tuesday.
The Central Regional Secretary of the Ghana National Association of Teachers (GNAT), William Boadu Abedi, who confirmed this to Citi News said Daniel Hammond was released last Friday.
“…The bail was granted on Thursday and he has been released from prison custody.” It is however, unclear whether the case will return to the court on Tuesday.
The teacher’s ‘crime’
The teacher, who is a former Presiding Member of the Ekumfi District Assembly, told Citi News that his supposed crime is that, he notified the DCE of some discrepancies in the President’s ‘Accounting to the People’ address regarding some construction work at Ekumfi-Esuehyia, also in the Central Region.
“So as a former presiding member of the assembly, I thought it wise to inform my DCE and the only thing I heard from my DCE was ‘how does it concern you?’ in a very harsh way,” Mr. Hammond recounted.
“I was in the class room teaching and I saw two police men approaching the school. The whole thing was that my DCE had reported me to police that I had insulted him so I should go to the police station with them.”
GNAT, wife appeal for his release
The national and regional leadership of GNAT together with the wife of the detained teacher, had demanded his release describing his incarceration as improper.
Some members of the NDC who visited him at the Winneba local prison promised to intervene since, in their view, the confusion between the DCE and the teacher was an internal party affair that needed to be handled amicably.
Teacher’s arrest politically motivated?
One of Hammond’s colleague teachers; Ebenezer Anim Spio, told Citi News the arrest was politically motivated.
“I am a colleague teacher and a friend so I came to sympathize with him because I believe what has happened to him can happen to me. We are all politically active and you don’t know when such a thing can happen to you. We all know that this is politically motivated and we know where it’s coming from, who’s doing it and why he’s doing it. But what we can say is that, it will backfire.
They say he should come to court on Tuesday and we will be there to support him with our lawyer and we will see where it ends. If sending a text to somebody is an assault and can land him in prison then the law must be clearer.
We want a better interpretation as to why a teacher teaching in the classroom should be arrested just because he has insulted somebody.” He said,
“This is clear power play because he was the former PM, and then something happened between the same powers and he was demoted and removed from office and somebody else has come to take the place so obviously there is power play; and then the undercurrent tension for this whole thing is politics although it’s within the same party.”
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