Censure Motion Is a Fishing Expedition

Professional thieves and political sponges on the public dole like Joyce Bawa Mogtari, the Mahama first cousin and so-called Special Aide to the former President, must have some shame and stop dogging Finance Minister Kenneth Ofori-Atta, as if she and her kleptocratic National Democratic Congress associates were the proverbial Gold Standard of visionary and progressive leadership in the country. You see, rather than kick and scream virulently for the ouster of the pioneering founder of the Databank financial services establishment, the triplets mothered former Mahama-appointed Deputy Road Transport Minister ought to be explaining to Ghanaian voters and taxpayers why she thinks we need to commit another egregious blunder by returning the kleptocratic inventor of the Savannah Accelerated Development Authority (SADA) back onto the seat of governance and our collective national destiny (See “Leave Before the Applause Ends, Fighting to Stay Is a Bad Idea – Mahama’s Aide Tells Ken Ofori-Atta” Modernghana.com 11/16/22).

For those of our avid and regular readers who may have so soon forgotten what widely came to be known as the “SADA Gravy-Train Scam,” the latter entailed the thievish establishment of a Board of Directors and Trustees of a taxpayer-funded Corporation that was ostensibly geared towards the acceleration of the socioeconomic and the material “catching-up” development of the northern half of the country, traditionally regarded by development experts as having been woefully and, perhaps, even deliberately neglected from the inception of the Postcolonial Ghanaian State. The criminally gross leadership incompetence of the entire SADA and GYEEDA and GUBA establishments, as mischievously conceived, copycat fashion, as usual, by the newly elected President Mahama, inhered in the fact that the sole and only qualification for being appointed a member of the SADA Board, and the latter’s allied ethnocentrically based rackets, was the prospective candidate’s or appointee’s northern ethnicity or birth and descent. It had absolutely nothing, whatsoever, to do with the proven managerial skills or professional competence of the appointees as, for example, attested by both demonstrable work experience and/or academic and professional credentials.

Well, as could have been readily predicted from the very beginning of this northern-development scam, at the end of his four-and-a-half-year tenure, SADA and its allied rackets had absolutely no tangible record or evidence on the ground to show for its activities or terms of reference. A handful of Mahama cronies and associates – like the Agambillas – would be exposed as having pocketed the lion’s share of SADA’s development funds for purely private use. Under the SADA project, a multimillion-dollar-funded project that was meant to reafforest or replenish the vegetation cover of large tracts of degraded northern lands were either not altogether cultivated or were inadvisably cultivated off-seasonally, that is, during the dry season when scarcely any trees or plants grew in the region. Then, of course, there was also the infamous “Guinea-Fowl Scandal,” better known as the “Nkonfem Saga” or the “Flying Guinea Fowls,” in which millions of dollars’ worth of investment capital earmarked for the development of poultry farming or livestock agriculture literally vanished through the thin air.

In all of the preceding scams and rackets, the Mahama-appointed principals and culprits were never fully brought to book or made to fully account for their thievish shenanigans. It is a damn pity and a tragedy that many of the critics and National Democratic Congress’ opposition party politicians who are now crying for the head of the Finance Minister to be delivered on a silver platter, are also the very same people who literally plunged the country into billions of dollars in debts at the expense of the Ghanaian taxpayer, while the Mahamas, Jinapors, Ayarigas and the Agambillas flooded their wallets and bank accounts with monies that could have been used to significantly meliorate the apocalyptic brunt of the COVID-19 Global Pandemic and the supply-chain aftereffects of Russia’s War on The Ukraine. Ghanaians also need to remember the indescribably deleterious effects of Dumsor, the perennially erratic supply of electricity over the protracted course of some four-and-a-half years, and the complete collapse of at least half of all business enterprises in the country, and the resulting exponential increase in the rate of unemployment in both the public and the private sectors of our national economy.

Even far more significant must be underscored the dozens of fiscally wasteful energy agreements entered into by grossly and criminally incompetent and kleptocratic Mahama appointees that have needed to be drastically renegotiated down, often with little or no success. These are some of the critical questions that the members of the Mahama Gang or the Gonja and the Sogakope Mafia must be peppered with, when they go on the electioneering-campaign stumps, vacuously and mischievously bragging about having bequeathed the incoming Akufo-Addo Administration with humongous national development funds. I mean, whatever happened to the $72 million (USD) that literally vanished under the watch of the then Labor Minister, Mr. Haruna Iddrisu, at the Social Security and National Insurance Trust (SSNIT), the hard-earned lifesavings of retiree civil and public servants? Now, is it not downright ironic that the Tamale-South National Democratic Congress’ Member of Parliament, who is also now the Parliamentary Minority Leader, would also spearhead the Censure Motion against Mr. Ofori-Atta?

As well, Mr. Cassiel Ato Forson, the indicted and kleptocratic Mahama-appointed Deputy Finance Minister, legally embroiled in the ongoing trial of the prime suspects in the Mahama importation of the 300-plus hulks or engineless vehicles criminally and publicly paraded as a fetching replenishment of the stock of the National Ambulance Service (NAS), in the runup to the 2016 General Election? Ultimately, Ghanaians may, after all, not be as morbidly afflicted with short memories the way that The Yagbonwura, Osagyefo Kwame Ouagadougou Gonja, would have the rest of us believe.

*Visit my blog at: KwameOkoampaAhoofeJr

By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., PhD

English Department, SUNY-Nassau

Garden City, New York

November 25, 2022

E-mail: [email protected]