Opinion › Feature Article       18.01.2019

JB Danquah Is Still on My Mind – Part 2

Ahmed Hussein-Suale

I have seen that picture before. I am referring to the photograph of the just-slain Mr. Ahmed Hussein-Suale, who has been described as a sometime staunch investigative associate of Mr. Anas Aremeyaw Anas, proprietor of the well-feared Tiger-Eye (PI) team of private investigators. There is something at once strange and bizarre, as well as interesting about this picture because when it first appeared in the media, courtesy of Mr. Kennedy Ohene Agyapong, owner of NET 2 TV, and was alleged to be that of either Mr. Anas or one of the members of the Tiger-Eye investigative team, it was vehemently denied by Mr. Kwaku Baako, Editor-Publisher of the New Crusading Guide, who is also widely known to have mentored Mr. Anas in journalistic sleuthing or investigative journalism.

Mr. Baako would later come public and half admit that, indeed, the photograph in question, if memory serves yours truly accurately, was that of a recently disaffected member of the Tiger-Eye PI team who had been fired by his boss because, and here I am going out on a limb by presuming that it was Mr. Ahmed Hussein-Suale who was alleged to have been given sometime to further hone his professional skills, but had either failed or flatly refused to do the same. But even more significant to highlight here is the fact that Mr. Baako, as I vividly recall, had publicly stated in the media that it was the then-unnamed former member of the Tiger-Eye’s investigative team who had been steadily feeding Mr. Agyapong with the sort of “inside dope” which the latter had been using to royally discredit Mr. Anas, in Mr. Agyapong’s rather sharp – and some even claimed, unnecessarily harsh – response to the Tiger-Eye docudrama called “Number 12,” which led to the forced resignation of the then-President of the Ghana Football Association (GFA), Mr. Kwasi Nyantakyi, and the FIFA-backed summary dissolution of the GFA.

“Number 12” was, of course, a seismic exposé on rank corruption in the administration of Ghana’s Association Football League. In the wake of Nyantakyi’s resignation, partly the result of a personal petition by Mr. Anas to the global soccer body, the Tiger-Eye’s lead investigator has also been relentless in his bid to have the former GFA boss rigorously prosecuted. On the latter count, it can be clearly seen that there is a solid edge of vendetta to the investigative journalism of Mr. Anas that could easily make the latter and his sleuthing colleagues prime targets of vendetta or retaliatory justice by people whose careers have been ruined by the work of the Tiger-Eye PI team, even as Mr. Agyapong pointedly notes in his reaction to accusations that he may very well be the mastermind behind the fatal gunning down of Mr. Hussein-Suale.

But, of course, Mr. Anas could be equally implicated in the murder of Mr. Hussein-Suale, if it turns out to be true that, indeed, the Tiger-Eye proprietor had had a falling out with the deceased over several months prior to Wednesday night’s gunning down of Mr. Hussein-Suale. Equally significant is the need for police investigators to clearly establish the fact of whether, indeed, even as Mr. Agyapong points out, on the night of his brutal slaying, Mr. Hussein-Suale was no longer either a partner or employee of Mr. Anas. This aspect of the investigation is especially important because, according to Mr. Agyapong, in the wake of the slaying of Mr. Hussein-Suale, Mr. Anas flooded social media networks with pictures and texts in which the NET 2 TV station owner was seen and heard calling for anybody who was willing to soundly thrash or beat up the deceased to come to him after the fact, or with evidence of having carried out his order and get handsomely paid for the effort or a job well done (See “Arrest Anas Over the Murder of Ahmed Hussein Suale – Kennedy Agyapong” Modernghana.com 1/17/19).

Now, this is particularly difficult to take because the sort of “beating” that Mr. Agyapong admits to having invited upon the body and person of the late Mr. Hussein-Suale is not very vastly different from a call for the life of the deceased to be violently snuffed out. But, of course, the sort of selective and wanton destruction of powerful personalities in Ghanaian society in which the dead man had been involved, collaboratively, with Mr. Anas, was clearly the sort of work that could unmistakably garner a harvest of violent death for the players involved. It is also quite plausible that sensing the radar of investigative suspicion being intensely beamed on him, and perhaps other possible suspects, as a result of his alleged falling out with his former employee or colleague, Mr. Anas could very well have floated the aforesaid pictures and texts on social media to strategically distract the attention and focus of police investigators from the possibly real mastermind behind this most heinous crime.

You see, Anas has every reason to think and believe that he could easily divert media and police’s attention from the real source and cause of such fatal mischief, because several governments in the past had validated and privileged the work of Tiger-Eye PI over and above that of the taxpayer-funded Ghana Police Service. To be certain, in the recent past, regimes sponsored by the now-main opposition National Democratic Congress (NDC), have relatively budgeted more money for the work of Tiger-Eye PI than for the relevant departments or divisions of the Ghana Police Service, such as the Criminal Investigations Department of the GPS, although such payments as were advanced to Tiger-Eye PI by the Mahama regime, especially, were never publicly disclosed. This is where the Freedom-of-Information Law comes in handy. Ghanaians have a right to know how every pesewa of their hard-earned money is spent by our government.

I have written and published a legion of columns on the deliberate and systematic destruction of our state and national security agencies and institutions and find absolutely no need to rehash the same here, except to counsel our leaders, including Mr. Agyapong, of course, to be circumspect in their utterances and public pronouncements, and to lay down our national priorities in ways that would not endanger the lives of professional mercenaries like the team members of the Tiger-Eye PI firm.

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

By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., PhD
English Department, SUNY-Nassau
Garden City, New York
January 17, 2019
E-mail: okoampaahoofe@optimum.net

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