Editor-in-Chief of the New Crusading Guide newspaper, Abdul Malik Kweku Baako, has stated that though he frowns upon insults on the person of the President, he thinks there is no big deal with the phenomenon because Mills is not the first president to have suffered such attacks. According to him, many past presidents and presidential candidates – like ex-president Kufuor and Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo Addo – have had to put up with insults and harsh criticisms at one point or the other. Therefore, he viewed it as an act of hypocrisy for anyone to cry foul when the president was insulted. Malik Baako made these comments when he was contributing to discussions on Peace FM’s news analysis programme Kokrokoo Wednesday. The New Patriotic Party (NPP) Member of Parliament for Assin North, Ken Agyepong, has been heavily critisised for referring to President John Evans Atta Mills as the ‘number one thief’ during a rally held by the party last weekend. Although Mr Baako saw that as unusual he acknowledged that it was wrong for anybody to label the president as such because: “You may not like the man, you may not even like his politics but [the] office he [currently] occupies comes with a certain dignity.” He called for a total ceasefire on the politics of insults and added that: “No matter what is happening there (in government) there is a certain borderline [we must not] cross." He however accused President Mills of hypocrisy for failing to rein-in his appointees who constantly attack the integrity of members of the opposition parties. “There are people in his (Mills) own camp who are insulting Kufuor, Nana Addo and the rest; who are using all sorts of dubious means to assassinate the character of Kufuor [and] Nana Akufo Addo and other members of the NPP right at the presidency ,” Baako charged. “Some holding ministerial or deputy ministerial positions, doesn’t he hear? …So where is hypocrisy coming from?“ He added that “I’m against that description [thief on the person of the president]…but that doesn’t mean we [Ghanaians] have the requisite competence or quality that must come with [an elected] leadership.