The New Patriotic Party chairman has described as “evil” government interpretation of a comment he made about the possibility of electoral violence breaking out in Ghana if the 2012 elections were not free and fair. Jake Obetsebi Lamptey insists his comments were well intentioned and has rather chided the government and its spokespersons of pressing negative buttons for their own selfish ends. The NPP chairman on an Accra radio station - Oman FM opined that Ghana is equally prone to post election violence if the lessons from other African countries were not learnt. “The majority of the people in Ivory Coast are Akans. The large part of the ethnics in Ghana are Akans. The other tribes and things- you know the colonial [masters] did a line so this side of the line is Ghana; that side of the line is Cote d’Ivoire. And the line goes through a number of villages. So it means the people on this side are actually the same as the people on that side. If they can have violence in Cote d’Ivoire where does it say we can’t have violence in Ghana?” he explained, adding, “where does it say that the people of Ghana are such dummies that they are going to allow themselves to be cheated of their birthright whereas the people in Cote d’Ivoire say they won’t allow themselves to be cheated.” “We have to assume that the same thing, the same reaction can come from the same people,” he noted. He said the people of Ghana are capable of violence and that “we have to make sure that we take every precaution to make sure that practice never happens.” His comments have been condemned by the government. Information Minister John Tia Akologo described the comments in a statement released Thursday as “ethnically divisive and explosive.” His deputy Baba Jamal told Joy News the 'war' mongering statements were unfortunate and ought not to have come from a National Chairman of the NPP- a party, whose track record in making ethnically misguided comments, he said, is legendary. Jamal mentioned the controversial “all-die-be-die” comments in which NPP flag-bearer Nana Akufo-Addo also made a violent-related comment about Akans. He said to draw an analogy between the situation in the Ivory Coast to that in Ghana is only an expression of Obetsebi Lamptey’s poverty of understanding on the issues in Cote d’Ivoire. He argued that Ghanaians have come a long way and are tolerant and need not be compared to the people in the Ivory Coast. But the NPP Chair is unmoved by government’s condemnation. He rather charged Baba Jamal’s interpretation of his statement as evil. “I find what Baba Jamal is saying as evil,” he said, explaining he had sought in his comments to explore the similarities between the two countries and that whatever happens in the Ivory Coast could happen in Ghana. “The way that he is trying to take what I said out of context; the way that he is trying to play politics with it is not to the benefit of this country. “The people of this country should take a warning from it. That there are people who are determined to twist things and to pretend and then to try and press buttons because they feel that those buttons are the ones that will entrench them to act in a particular way,” he said. Play the attached for excerpts of the Jake's comments and the reactions'