Animal Farm Dilemma and the Airbus Scandal

I have yet to read and digest the full contents of the former Independent Special Prosecutor's rejoinder to that which has been released to the media by the Office of the Presidency. Nevertheless, it clearly looks to me that as a nation, we are in very deep trouble and have a very long way to go vis-à-vis the evenhanded administration of justice, where official corruption is concerned, without regard to sociopolitical status, where a misdeed or a crime so forensically attested or objectively established to have been committed or perpetrated against the State and the Ghanaian people, becomes of overriding and foremost significance (See “Airbus Scandal: Martin Amidu Hits Hard at CDD's Prof. H. Kwasi Prempeh” Ghanaweb.com 11/28/20).

In the afore-referenced news story, Mr. Martin ABK Amidu is reported to have critically noted that the Executive-Director of the Center for Democratic Development (CDD), was flagrantly offside or deeply involved in a conflict-of-interest situation, when the former Seton Hall, New Jersey, Professor of Law noted, while commenting on the reason or reasons given by the recently resigned Independent Special Prosecutor for deferring prosecutorial proceedings against former President John Dramani Mahama, on grounds that Prof. Prempeh was a close friend of President Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo. Mr. Amidu has also been reported to have observed that the suggestion that he go with the filing of criminal charges against the former President, in the matter of the globally infamous scandalous racket of the European Airbus-SE Payola Extortion, came shortly after Mr. Mahama had won his party's nomination to contest the 2020 Presidential Election.

Now, it clearly looks as if the political implications of such indictment or prosecutorial proceedings were in favor of the recently resigned Independent Special Prosecutor. But the pertinent question to also ask in this particular instance regards why it took so unduly long for Mr. Amidu to arrive at the watershed decision of whether to defer or proceed with the indictment of a newly elected Candidate John Dramani Mahama, when both the Government and the Office of the Independent Special Prosecutor had been in possession of the actionable or incriminating evidence for months before the nomination and/or election of the former President as the 2020 Presidential Candidate of the country's main opposition National Democratic Congress.

In other words, it is materially irrelevant whether Prof. Prempeh was the bosom friend of President Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo or not. The fact of the matter is that the felonious crime of extortion of the Ghanaian taxpayers' money had been established beyond any iota or shadow of doubt by three of the most competent judicial establishments in the West and, for matter, the global community, namely, Great Britain, France and the United States of America. In the person of former President John Dramani Mahama, we are also talking about a roguish career politician who has publicly and smugly admitted on more than several occasions to the fact of bribery extortions being his modus operandi. And not only that, the Mahama administration is also widely known to have been seismically rocked by more scandals involving both the flat and outright embezzlement of the Ghanaian taxpayer's money as well as the deliberately gross and wanton misuse of the same than any other government in Ghana's postcolonial history.

For instance, in just within the first two years of his accession to the Presidency, Mr. Mahama and his late Vice-President, Mr. Kwesi Bekoe Amissah-Arthur, racked up over GHȻ 275 Million in what has been determined to be “dubious judgement-debt payments,” which invariably entailed the collusive conspiracy of Mahama government operatives with companies and individuals making dubious claims about debts supposedly owed them by the Government of Ghana, past and present, and by extension, the Ghanaian taxpayer. But what makes these judgment-debt cases even more morally, politically and legally suspect and downright untenable is that, for the most part, monetary damages awarded the shady recipients of the same, often foreign nationals, are known to have been shared with key government operatives behind closed doors.

Personally, what I find to be most curious about Mr. Martin Amidu is the fact that the longest-serving Jerry John Rawlings-appointed Deputy Attorney-General and Deputy Minister of Justice, critically carped the Legislative or Legal Instrument that brought the portfolio of the Office of the Independent Special Prosecutor into existence in several media columns and articles that Mr. Amidu wrote and published while the law establishing the Office of the Independent Special Prosecutor was undergoing heated parliamentary debates. So, the recently resigned Independent Special Prosecutor was fully aware of the detailed terms of reference of the job that would be eventually handed to him by President Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo.

And yet, in the little over two years that he held the job or portfolio of Independent Special Prosecutor, all that Mr. Amidu significantly did was to bitterly complain about the statutory inadequacy of the powers afforded the Office of the Independent Special Prosecutor, as to make any avid observer of the entire proceedings that culminated in the creation of the Office of the Independent Special Prosecutor wonder whether, indeed, Mr. Amidu was really serious about the very establishment of the office and his active engagement in the admittedly uphill battle against official corruption in the country to which, by the way, he singularly knighted himself as “The Citizen Vigilante.” He claims that adequate funding for his former office had been deliberately withheld from him. But this allegation has been thoroughly disproved by media fact checkers and roundly rejected by the man who appointed Comrade Amidu to the job.

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By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., PhD
English Department, SUNY-Nassau
Garden City, New York
November 28, 2020

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