Security capo shot down

Brig Joseph Nunoo-Mensah (rtd) The Attorney-General and Minister of Justice, Betty Naa-Akyyer Mould-Iddrisu, has shot down the military-junta type announcement made last week by the National Security Advisor, Brig Joseph Nunoo-Mensah (rtd), that ex-ministers of the New Patriotic Party (NPP) government will soon face the full rigours of the law 'for causing financial loss to the state'.

Similarly, Dr. Nyaho Nyaho-Tamkloe, immediate past Ghanaian envoy to Serbia, also lambasted Brig. Nunoo-Mensah, describing his statement as a threat to the people of this country.

Speaking on various radio stations in Accra yesterday, the Attorney-General denied media reports that government was set to prosecute former government officials soon, contradicting the security capo's statement which torched off a massive rejection, especially among the opposition, which said it was unshaken by the threats.

According to Mrs. Mould-Iddrisu, although government was still considering a report issued by the Don Arthur Transition Committee which investigated assets transfers, she would not confirm if government would soon hit the courts to prosecute former ministers in the erstwhile NPP administration thought to have fallen foul of the law.

While confirming that the Don Arthur Committee report had dropped some names, Mould-Iddrisu indicated that further investigations into such allegations would be done before Government decides whether or not to prosecute any former government.

“Everybody is free to make allegations; it is then incumbent on a responsible government to investigate those allegations, and that is precisely what we are doing,” she said.

Meanwhile, a fuming Nyaho-Tamakloe, dragging Nunoo-Mensah to the cleaners, stated, “We are not being ruled by a military junta but by democratic governance and so, the National Security Advisor should know better and avoid such unacceptable conduct.

“Ghanaians cannot be cowed by such outbursts by a man who has no business phoning into a radio station to talk the way he did last week,” he added.

Dr. Nyaho-Tamakloe said that it was regrettable that a person who was entrusted with the task of ensuring the stability of the nation would turn round and issue outright threats to the citizenry.

A National Security Advisor, according to him, should not engage in partisanship as Brig Nunoo-Mensah was doing.

For someone of Nunoo-Mensah's stature, he emphasized, such outbursts sounded really outrageous, given that his War College studies entailing such subjects as International Relations and Politics should have moulded him better, Nyaho-Tamakloe stated.

“This is a democracy and we have had many National Security Advisors since independence; but none has conducted himself in the manner in which Brig Nunoo-Mensah is doing today,” the former envoy stated.

“Not even Capt Kojo Tsikata (rtd) behaved the way Brig Nunoo-Mensah is behaving,” he said, explaining that the one-time National Security Advisor sought to dialogue with others, a quality which he said the current advisor lacked.

He recalled with nostalgia the days when Francis Poku was in charge of the country's National Security and advised the old Brigadier to remember that Ghana was under a democracy and not a junta.

“Brig Nunoo-Mensah is talking as though he is the Attorney General and forgetting that under a democracy, such matters as prosecuting persons follows laid down civilized procedures completely devoid of arbitrariness as witnessed under the PNDC”.

This, he said, was known as due process which must be adhered to strictly.

The last elections in which the winner was ahead by a thin 23,000 votes, suggested that the country was almost equally divided, he said, and cautioned that the government should be tactful with regard to how it manages the affairs of state.

He was however quick to add that “this is not to state that whoever is found to have mis-conducted themselves in the management of state matters should not be sanctioned. This should be done with strict adherence to the rule of law and devoid of malice or personal vendetta.”

By his conduct in recent times, Brig Nunoo-Mensah had weakened the pillars of democracy in the country and there was the need to apologise to the people of this country now, Dr. Nyaho-Tamakloe said.

The national security advisor's utterances suggested, according to the ambassador, that the government he was serving was going to influence the Judiciary to act in a particular fashion, but the NPP, he added, would not do anything to disturb a case in which any of its members was brought to court justly.  

“We would allow the court to deal with the matter as it deems fit. We would not unleash our supporters on the court premises like the NDC did when some of their members appeared before the court of law,” he stressed.

In a similar vein, one of the rumoured targets of Nunoo-Mensah's outbursts, Maxwell Kofi Jumah, former deputy Minister of Local Government and Rural Development and MP for Asokwa, said he was ready to face prosecutors in court, describing the report as a joke and the committee members as a “bunch of jokers”.

He in turn recommended them for prosecution, accusing them of causing financial loss to the state.

“If this is the kind of job they were paid to do, then they have caused financial loss to the state.

“We shouldn't waste our time over child's play,” Hon Jumah said angrily.

He dared the government to begin prosecutions against him, stressing he was as “clean as Jesus Christ” and claiming that he too had damaging cases against members of government, “including the President himself”.

The National Security Advisor, last week noisily joined the fray of the ruling party and its media, calling for the heads of NPP former ministers whom they claimed they had cases of financial impropriety against.

The old Brigadier, without mentioning names, described as criminals, some members of the previous government, contending that they should be dealt with- something that was going to happen in this country very soon, he added.

His veiled threat has not been taken kindly by a broad spectrum of Ghanaians, some of whom found it bizarre that a National Security Advisor would speak on a radio programme the way he did.

Brig Nunoo-Mensah was a Chief of Defence Staff during the PNDC era, flirted with the NPP for sometime and even attempted going to Parliament on the party's ticket but failed.

He was one of those banned from visiting military installations after attending a meeting at the residence of ex-President Rawlings at Ridge, but in a defiant fashion, spat at the ban saying, “I have ears at Burma Camp”.

By A.R. Gomda