Ghana and Her Neocolonialist Afropean Leaders

The conversation captured in the documentary film by the Anas Aremeyaw Anas-owned Tiger-Eye Private Investigators Company Limited, in which the recently dismissed Minister of State at the Finance Ministry, Mr. Charles Adu-Boahen, is seen and heard telling some fake potential Gulf-Arab sheikh investors that in order to get their businesses established and successfully incorporated in Ghana, they would need to pay, upfront, something called an “Appearance Fee” of $200,000 (USD) to Vice-President Mahamudu Bawumia, tells us more about the mindset of our ministerial appointees, by and large, and the rancid culture or subculture of rank corruption at the Ministry of Finance, than it really tells us anything substantive about the professional profile or the allegedly and purportedly questionable character of the prime subject of obloquy or malicious defamation or character assassination (See “Anas Exposé: Full Conversations between Dismissed Charles Adu Boahen and ‘Dubai Investor’” Modernghana.com 11/14/22).

Among the Akan, we have what might be aptly called the “Index-Finger Theory,” which says that anytime that any self-righteous accuser points his/her forefinger, in the form of an indictment, at another, the keen observer can rest assured of the fact of the other three fingers of the accuser’s hand pointing squarely at that accuser herself/himself. Matters are made even more complicated for the dismissed minister, when Mr. Adu-Boahen infers, rather cavalierly, that the Vice-President comes from a very large family and thus would require the offering of an even more humongous payola payment than the diddly sum of $200,000 (USD), as an “Appearance Fee,” in order to fully guarantee the transactional support or the direct and staunch backing of the former Deputy-Governor of the Bank of Ghana.

But, of course, Ghanaians also have a saying that “When the Frog/Toad emerges from the Galamsey-polluted riverbed of The Birem or The Densu to announce the sudden death of King Crocodile, only an arrant fool or a clinically certified idiot can vehemently dispute such claim.” The glaringly incontrovertible fact of the matter is that even if one unreservedly hypothetically grants Vice-President Bawumia the proverbial benefit of the doubt, the question still remains, vis-à-vis that equally logically compelling maxim which dares the addressee to show the speaker his/her friend in order for the speaker to reveal the mirror-image or the true and unvarnished identity of the addressee. This is what is also commonly called “Guilt by Association.”

In short, there exists an abjectly rank and unspeakable level of official corruption within the very “fabric” or the functional and operational makeup of the Akufo-Addo/Bawumia Government for whose culpability neither the President nor the Vice-President could credibly claim any remarkable modicum of innocence. This Government is their “Baby” for whose waywardness or prodigality Messrs. Akufo-Addo and Bawumia stand obligated of full responsibility, especially when you also have the former Attorney-General and Minister of Justice smugly and cavalierly parrying off seismic public outcry for ministerial reshuffling and thorough executive overhaul, with the rather scandalous riposte that: “So far, the general performance of all my [ministerial] appointees has far exceeded my expectation.”

It would also be very interesting what the Office of the Independent Special Prosecutor, which has been charged by the President to investigate allegations made by Mr. Adu-Boahen in the Anas Aremeyaw Anas’ “Galamsey Economy” documentary, unearths about the assertion or claim by the subject of this column about Vice-President Bawumia’s being worried sick about his 2020 Electioneering Campaign Financial Losses. Ghanaian voters have a right to know about any debts incurred by our major political players, both politicians belonging to the ruling New Patriotic Party (NPP) and those belonging to the country’s main opposition National Democratic Congress (NDC), and the ways and means by which these kleptocratic politicians, at least most of them, have defrayed or managed to liquidate such debts.

Such knowledge should tell us enough about why the country appears to be in the form and shape of a bottomless pail or bucket into which torrents of national development funds are being poured from all corners of the world, without any remarkable or palpable evidence of quality-of-life improvement projects and/or amenities, for the most part. Charles Adu-Boahen also appears to have operated more like a cutthroat parasitic foreign investment broker or middleman, a la Ponzi Scheme proportions, than a bona fide Ghanaian citizen comfortably salaried by Ghanaian taxpayers to manage our affairs. A veritable “Loan Shark,” I actually meant to both say and imply. Else, why would the fired Deputy Finance Minister demand a 20-percent consultancy fee or commission from the hypothetical investment of a stupendous $500 million (USD)? Now, who said, warts and all, some of us do not miss the June Fourth Faux Revolution? That is just how desperate for official accountability are we.

*Visit my blog at: KwameOkoampaAhoofeJr

By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., PhD
English Department, SUNY-Nassau
Garden City, New York
November 15, 2022
E-mail: [email protected]