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11.11.2014 Editorial

Eyes Are Watching

By Daily Guide
Eyes Are Watching
11.11.2014 LISTEN

Justice Yaw Apau
The Judgement Debt Commission set up to investigate payments made to some individuals and organizations under questionable circumstances, wound up its public sittings last week.

According to the Sole-Commissioner, Justice Yaw Apau of the Court of Appeal, the commission was retiring into the chambers to write its final report, hoping to submit it by the close of the year to President Mahama.

The president set up the commission upon taking over the reins of power in 2012 when judgement debt payments had become rampant, with the suspicion that some government and state officials were profiting from what has now been termed as 'create loot and share enterprise.'

However, the commission surprisingly refused to invite the main actors in the judgement debt business, amidst justification that it had enough dossiers on those people.

'With every Commission that is set up, it is the Commission… that decides persons that should appear before it. We felt that there was no need inviting Betty Mould-Iddrisu, Woyome, etc. The reason is that we had a lot of dossiers on them. We had also written to them. They themselves had provided dossiers on what they had done and then we ourselves through our own research, had gathered a lot of information that they did not know about them so we would sieve those information and whatever conclusions we want we will get them out of those documents. That is the reason why we did not call them,' Kofi Sokpor , counsel for the commission,reportedly told the media.

And that is where the problem lies because the commission, by refusing to subject the main characters – especially when their names had been mentioned strongly - to scrutiny, cannot arrive at a fair conclusion.

It is only fair that they are allowed to defend themselves publicly, especially when it claimed that it had gathered dossiers about the people without their knowledge. How does the commission test the authenticity of the information gathered? Anything short of putting the said dossiers before the judgement debt characters openly is nothing but an attempt to engage in a cover-up, which we don't believe the sole commissioner would want to do.

Betty Mould-Iddrisu, the former Attorney General and her deputy, Ebo Barton-Odro, played leading roles in the dubious judgement debt payments, especially when it was reported that then President Atta Mills stopped them from effecting some of the dodgy payments.

How come then that the commission decided to treat them with kid's gloves when in the matter of the Discoverer 511 drillship, live television cameras were beamed on two former ministers –  Messrs Albert Kan Dapaah and KT Hammond, who served in the Kufuor administration. They were linked to the sale of the ship to defray GNPC's indebtedness to its bankers and creditors and were invited to appear before the commission for questioning.

We hope that the two years' exercise will not be a wasted venture, steeped in the murky waters of Ghanaian politics – with the conclusion that 'judgement debt transcends a particular government,' – when it is obvious that a particular administration made it an enterprise with appointees making themselves agents for dubious characters who were parading in the corridors of power in search of free money.

We hope that those who doubted the sincerity of the commission right from the onset will not be singing hallelujah; for them to say 'we told you so' with the chicken coming home to roost. Eyes are watching.

 
 

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