The Anatomy of A Forger

A portrait of the perpetrator of the So-called Rawlings Hit-List

On the 20th of November I received an e-mail said to be a forwarded copy of an original mail. sent on Tuesday, November 18, 2008 8:48 AM. I noticed however that despite making extraordinary attempts to convince the reader as to the authenticity of the of the mail, I noticed breaks in the hyperlink text of the recipients e-mail address. That for me made the claim that the letter being forwarded to me emanated from the e-mail of the recipient technically inadmissible.

Quite apart from that there were very strange contradictions in the story. Apart from using his real name all his operations and contacts are heavily coded. I am reluctant to accept that the pervasive use of coded words with the name JJ Rawlings standing out clearly amidst all these jargon is an orchestrated imitation of the world of codes carefully crafted for a political end.

The impersonator of JJ Rawlings appears only to use his name in his political discourse, whilst he strangely fits into a caricature of the JJ Rawlings that the ruling party has been spinning over the years. The e-mail is a strange dramatic monologue where the persona invoked exchanges character with a caricature and imposing it on the real one with a meaningless and obviously fraudulent domainskeys certification. A fortuitous terminology which helps a lot to strengthen our suspicions that the original also had a bankers hand in the affair, but the draft might have been spiced up by someone with some military background. There are many serving and retired New Patriotic Party (NPP) supporters who fit into this category.

Domainskeys verification for obvious reasons may be so popular among bankers, is not in everyday use. This helps in a way to provide an index that finally confirm our initial suspicions. The mentality of the writer has a particular political slant whose principal residential address is found in most of the NPP propaganda against JJ Rawlings and the National Democratic Congress (NDC), especially in the Central Region leading up to the first round. It was deployed to stem the tides of their political demise in the region. It did not work then. I do not see how that would work now.

Indeed I made my initial comments known to a small circle of friends whose names appeared in my mail as co-recipients. I then forwarded a copy to my good friend, Mr. Kwesi Pratt, Jnr. whose name also appeared on the hit list, alerting them of the possible repercussions of such a devious plot.

This is actually an election season and there are all sorts of issues flying about taking the place of the real national debate of what the political economic and social differences there are between the two, foreign policy issues on vital questions such as the Economic Partnership Agreement withe EU, the climate change and how it impacts on government policy. Akufo Addo says when voted he would introduce the chemical intensive, environmentally polluting corporate dominated and therefore socially excluding mechanised agriculture as a way of lifting the people off poverty...? long term and medium term plan for the security of our vital national resources, water resources, forests, oil.. ? contingency and long term plans for the climate change and its consequences of floods and drought..?

I think I have a lead on this guy. Me and my friends from the Peace is Justice and Fairness Campaign are currently sifting through the comments posted by the same individual with many names, always the same theme:

1. Insulting Ghanaians for voting NDC.
2. Demonising Rawlings,
3. Presenting Atta-Mills as the floodgate to murderous activities by Rawlings if NDC wins.

4. Hence the urgent need to vote NPP.
The reason why we think it is the same person is because he was the first to comment on this in the statesman when the statesman joined this campaign. You have the impression that he had been a little impatient with the time it took before it came into the media. Thereafter he followed each news item with the same comments, the same tittles, the words, the same mistakes. There is no other commentator on the Internet who has spent more time moving from one news page to another to evangelically insult Ghanaians, demonise Rawlings and present Atta-Mills as weak person who cannot stop Rawlings murderous plans. Hence the urgent need to vote NPP.

Try to do your own little tour. Go to the news pages of the Statesman, Daily Guide, see for example "Panic Over Killer List" The character to look for goes by the name of Paa Grant in most of the forums. I wish to refrain from making direct links so that you may discover for yourself what we have been saying for some time now. Please go to Ghanaweb and read the comments each time the news of the hit list appeared, and you would realise a familiar character. It is important to note that this character rarely appears in the forums not discussing the hit list and where he does appear, irrespective of the topic under discussion, he would invariable talk about the hit list. He only recently began to change his name, so it is very easy to trace him.

There is a strange coincidence of the self-appointed mission of this commentator and the theme of the hit-list mail. Everything, even including the insults. Apart from the fact that this is the same as the purported objectives of these e-mails, they all share the writers desire to write his comments in capital letters. They are always in capital letters, The third sign is that there is a little struggle with the English language. Not very obvious but always there.

Please feel free to visit and let us brainstorm together to create a clean political environment for a thriving and vibrant democracy that would not allow politically toxic habits to prevail. We solemnly promise to pursue and bring to justice these perpetrators and merchants of death, irrespective of the outcome of the impending elections. We have a mission to clean up the political discourse in order to allow the real voices of the people and their real anguish and aspirations to be heard, and not submerged under a heap of dangerous lies.

Season's greetings!
click here for a demonstration that the message is a fake one as the recipient could not even be said to have technically received this message in the first place. It was not meant for a specific recipient but for the Ghanaian voter.

Ali-Masmadi Jehu-Appiah
Peace is Justice and Fairness Campaign

www.africaconvention.org