It Took Rawlings Twenty Years to Admit Abacha Payola

By the way, today, January 13, is 47 years since the Ignatius Kutu Acheampong-led National Redemption Council (NRC) overthrew the Prime Minister Kofi Abrefa Busia-led, democratically elected government of the Progress Party (PP). Acheampong and some eight other former military rulers would be summarily executed by firing squad by Chairman Jerry John Rawlings and his Armed Forces Revolutionary Council (AFRC) junta some seven years later. On this occasion, though, I am more interested in the Menzgold Ponzi Scheme and the widely alleged snagging of some dirty, old greedy bastards, largely belonging to the country’s main opposition National Democratic Congress (NDC), including the latter party’s acclaimed founding-father and Ghana’s longest-reigning dictator, Chairman Jerry John Rawlings (See “Rawlings Rubbish[sic] Menzgold Customer List” Modernghana.com 1/13/19).

I don’t doubt the least bit that a humongous number of the founding members and movers-and-shakers of the National Democratic Congress may very well be caught in the Menzgold and Zylofon fraudulent network. I strongly suspect this based on the desperate and importunate calls and demands by Mr. Cassiel Ato Forson, the former Mahama-appointed Deputy Finance Minister, who rather absurdly pretends as if the entire racket was established and supervised by the operatives of the Akufo-Addo-led government of the New Patriotic Party (NPP). The fact of the matter is that Menzgold, like the Mahama-supervised DKM scam, was established with the executive or governance blessing of the National Democratic Congress, either by willful complicity or the gross incompetence of these faux-socialist NDC greedy bastards.

The operation of the Menzgold Ponzi Scheme strikingly and horribly reflects the gross administrative incompetence of the Rawlings and Mahama Posse because until last September, when the executive operatives of the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) directed the Appiah-Mensah Gang to promptly cease its operations, because the group was operating without a license, and had been doing so for quite some time, the previous Mahama-led National Democratic Congress’ regime had cavalierly pretended as if Menzgold was the greatest bonanza to have struck the African continent since the discovery of gold and diamond on the Rand, South Africa, between the 1860s and the 1880s. As of this writing, the Chief Executive Officer of Menzgold, Nana Appiah-Mensah, who had been reported to be on the lam, at least since last week, was conflictingly being reported by the media to have just been arrested in Dubai, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), by Interpol. The latter report has since been denied.

We shall be examining this aspect of the Menzgold Saga, as it were, in due course. The apparent success of the Menzgold racket was reportedly due to the fact that the operators of the scheme promised to deliver 10 times the interest rate afforded customers of regular banking institutions. Like a traditional Ponzi Scheme, we are told that the Appiah-Mensah Gang delivered quite around the clock until the bottom of the bucket, literally, went bust, in Marleyian parlance. Now, where this column comes in has to do with the reported tweeting by former President Jerry John Rawlings, whose name has been mentioned as one of the royally scammed greedy-bastard investors, that he never invested any money in the Menzgold ventures, and that any report to the contrary was merely a wicked attempt to defame him and tarnish his image, or what may be presently left of the same.

“I do not have a stash [of cash] anywhere to waste on questionable ventures,” the certified old butcher was reported to have posted on his tweet account the other day. You see, it is not a simple question of whether, indeed, Mr. Rawlings had invested his money or gold collectibles in the Menzgold scam. It is just that Ghana’s longest-reigning strongman has established himself beyond any reasonable shadow of a doubt for quite some time now that he cannot be taken at his word. Not by any stretch of the imagination. He established such deservedly negative credential when Chairman Rawlings either extorted or solicited some $ 5 Million (USD) from former Nigerian strongman, Gen. Sani Abacha, late, with the lurid promise of doing an image-sanitizing publicity for the infamous kleptocrat. And for some 20 years, Chairman Rawlings vehemently and disdainfully denied ever taking a kobo from Gen. Abacha, until Mr. Rawlings was outsmarted by a heavy-lifting Nigerian journalist with steely spine into confessing to the fact that, indeed, he had been lying for nearly 20 years about the Abacha Payola Scam.

Chairman Rawlings would be better off keeping mum over the question of whether he had, indeed, been stiffed or scammed by the NAM-1 Gang, instead of laughably pretending as if he and/or his wife, Nana Konadu Agyeman-Rawlings, have any respectable modicum of a credible image to protect. Calling on the Menzgold operatives to come out and confirm or deny that the former President has any moneys locked up in their SEC-shuttered enterprise would not solve any problem, whatsoever, least of all, the undeniable fact of hundreds of thousands of greedy-bastard Ghanaian citizens having lost their seed moneys in the process.

*Visit my blog at: kwameokoampaahoofe.wordpress.com Ghanaffairs

By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., PhD

English Department, SUNY-Nassau

Garden City, New York

January 13, 2019

E-mail: okoampaahoofe@optimum.net