Captain Smart Thinks Amidu Was Incurably Incompetent

If, as Captain Smart of Angel FM is saying, the recently resigned Independent Special Prosecutor, Mr. Martin ABK Amidu, signed for the disbursement of some GHȻ 36 Million as compensation for the staff of government employees assigned to the Office of the Independent Special Prosecutor, as recently as 2018, then it stands to reason to surmise that funding for his specially created portfolio was the least bit of the worries of the Atta-Mills-fired Attorney-General and Minister of Justice (See “GHȻ 36 M Compensation Was Shared Among the Staff of the OSP – Captain Smart Alleges” Ghanaweb.com 11/22/20).

You see, I personally fiercely fought for Mr. Amidu to be named as the first Independent Special Prosecutor in Ghana’s Fourth Republic, not strictly on the basis of merit or established record of competence but the widely perceived injustice meted him by the then-President John Evans Atta-Mills, in the wake of Mr. Amidu’s very public flat refusal to allow Mr. Alfred Agbesi Woyome to comfortably keep his criminally extorted sum of GHȻ 51.2 Million of the Ghanaian taxpayer’s money. We need to also underscore the fact that in the wake of the uncovering of the Woyome Mega-Heist, the then-President Atta-Mills and his Vice-President, Mr. John Dramani Mahama, had convened a press conference during which the two most powerful elected officials of the land had brazenly insisted that Mr. Woyome had an inalienable constitutional right to keep the illegally gifted Ghanaian taxpayer’s money.

It would also later pan out that, indeed, Messrs. Mills and Mahama had approved of the release of the aforesaid loot with the full knowledge of the fact that the awardee had lied about being owed that much by the Ghanaian taxpayer. That knowledge had been voluntarily imparted by Mr. Yaw Osafo-Maafo, the former Finance Minister under the tenure of the John Agyekum-Kufuor Administration. As well, Ghanaians would later discover, via clear hints from a legally cornered Mr. Woyome that, indeed, this Mega-Heister had merely fronted for the top-echelon leadership of the National Democratic Congress, and that the bulk of the GHȻ 51.2 Million had been divided up among the front-row leadership of the National Democratic Congress, including the likes of Messrs. Atta-Mills, Mahama, Asiedu-Nketia and Ofosu-Ampofo.

Which is why it ought to come as a very bad joke to hear a shamelessly thievish politician like Candidate Mahama vow to prosecute the principal actors and masterminds of the Agyapa Mineral Royalties Investment Deal, in the highly unlikely event of the former President and his National Democratic Congress’ being voted back to Jubilee House. The fact of the matter is that the kleptocratic former President John Dramani Mahama has absolutely no moral credibility to presume to prosecute any bona fide Ghanaian citizen. I have said this umpteen times before that the Gonja-born professional “Witch-Hunter” ought to be behind bars himself and not on the presidential electioneering campaign trail, foolishly entertaining the criminal idea of a political comeback, as his constitutional immunity from prosecution hurtles near its expiration date, come December 7, 2020. This is primarily why an epically defeated Mr. Mahama has been desperately and fiercely fighting to further postpone or extent the imminent expiration date of his indemnity from legal and judicial prosecution.

Anyway, Angel FM’s Captain Smart, host of the “Anopa Bofuor” [Morning Angel or Messenger] current affairs program, further reports that while he was in office as Ghana’s Independent Special Prosecutor, Mr. Martin ABK Amidu requested funding for a humongous GHȻ 360 Million annual budget and was promptly availed the same by the Presidency but seemed to have been jittery and dithery over how to effectively use the same, in spite of constant encouragement by the Presidency not to hesitate to appropriate the same for his work as the Independent Special Prosecutor. Ultimately, an apparently professionally paralyzed Mr. Amidu who had been unable to hire his own suite of staff appointees, composed of auditors and forensic investigators, would bitterly complain about his office’s being inundated or jampacked with brigades of seconded staff appointees from other government ministries, departments and agencies, thus thoroughly and effectively compromising the integrity and credibility of his office.

Form his abjectly messy handling of the alleged suspects in the barbaric slaying of Yaa-Naa Yakubu Andani, II – he lamely claims that the buck of blame belongs to his immediate predecessor at the Ministry of the Attorney-General and Justice, Mrs. Betty Mould-Iddrisi – those of us who staunchly supported the appointment of Mr. Amidu ought to have given such dubious support, in retrospect, some serious thought. You see, the man had never really worked under a genuinely democratic system where he had to do serious independent thinking and administrative work. Under the Rawlings-Tsikata Diarchy, everything had been rigged up for him, including the muffing up of “witch-hunted” criminal suspects who had been literally prepackaged, precondemned and just thrown at him to simply slip on the heads of these victims a make-believe hood of judicial justice. A good lesson learned here; I hope.

*Visit my blog at: KwameOkoampaAhoofeJr

By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., PhD

English Department, SUNY-Nassau

Garden City, New York

November 22, 2020

E-mail: [email protected]