Has Domelevo Forgotten the Rawlings-Mills-Sponsored Colombian Drug Lords in Ghana?

The idea of Mr. Daniel Yaw Domelevo, the former Akufo-Addo-appointed Auditor-General, being a firebrand Anti-Corruption Campaigner in Ghana is laughable news to me, to be frank and upfront with the Dear Reader (See “ ‘Auctioneering Our Elections’: Drug Lords, Terrorists Will Soon Take Over Ghana – Domelevo Warns” Modernghana.com 3/13/24). It is very funny, and almost definitely ludicrous, for the Kumasi-born Voltaian or Voltaic who, I have personally been informed, prefers to spell his middle name in the standard Akan orthography of “Yaw,” instead of the standard Ewe variation of “Yao” – he is particular and very sensitive about this aspect of his name – to be coming to this sobering and eerie realization this late in life, that elections in Ghana, these days, have become a stark matter of the highest bidder taking home all the cash winnings, that is, the very exact opposite of what the late Mr. Kofi Atta Annan, the first indigenous African Secretary-General of the United Nations (UN), warned our leaders against some two decades ago.

During the maiden edition of a Leadership Ethics Seminar that was recently held in Ho, the Volta Regional Capital, Mr. Domelevo, who is approximately the same age as Truly Yours, that is, a couple of years upwards of three score, was widely reported to have made the following declaration: “We are in an election year, which I term an auction year. We are auctioning public offices. So, the highest bidder wins the auction at the end of the day.” Now, such declaration is at once very humorous and hypocritical because Ghanaians just this past May 2023, witnessed a Presidential-Primary Election Contest, in which the Serial and the Dynastic Presidential Candidate of the country’s main opposition National Democratic Congress (NDC), of which Mr. Domelevo is widely known to be a card-carrying member, forked up an estimated GH₡50 million to clinch some 98-percent of the heavily rigged election in which the most formidable challenger to the twice-defeated, former one-term President, to wit, Dr. Kwabena Duffuor, was literally barred from contesting, even after the top leadership of the party had publicly admitted to having deliberately and heavily rigged the party’s voters’ register in favor of the preferred candidate, namely, Mr. John “Ouagadougou-Nkonfem Flying” Dramani Mahama.

Of course, what has commonly and shamelessly become known as “Vote Buying” is neither peculiar nor restricted to the filthy rich – largely ill-gotten public dole/dough – top leadership of the National Democratic Congress. It also pertains to the modus operandi of the top leadership of the presently ruling New Patriotic Party (NPP), although it is relatively on a much smaller scale in the latter political establishment. Nonetheless, what we want to even more remarkably emphasize here is this rather quaint and downright risible Domelevo observation that, somehow, the apparent control of the country’s democratic culture by drug barons and other shady underworld characters only began under the watch of the present Akufo-Addo-led government of the New Patriotic Party. No such bizarre and hypocritical observation could at once be more patently false and historically mendacious.

The fact of the matter is that as far back as the very beginning of Ghana’s Fourth-Republican Dispensation, that is, from January 7, 1993 to January 7, 2001, the late President Jeremiah “Jerry” John Rawlings-led government of the National Democratic Congress was widely known to have created a well-fortified haven in the East-Legon District of Ghana’s capital city of Accra for some Colombian, South America, drug cartel fugitive warlords who were also widely alleged to have been generously provided with a 24-Hour security cordon and cheap local Ghanaian sex workers around the clock. Now, what the foregoing clearly means is that it is highly likely that it was this NDC-sponsored Mafia-type racket that recently gave Candidate-General John “Gnassingbe” Dramani Mahama the idea for his largely sloganeering so-called national-development proposal of running a 24-Hour Economy, that is, in the highly unlikely event of the Bole-Bamboi native from the West-Gonja Constituency, in the Akufo-Addo-created Savannah Region, being returned to the Presidency or Jubilee House.

Now, this is rather ludicrous because this is a former President who could not even turn the lights on for more than 24 Minutes under his four-and-half-year watch or tenure. We also vividly recall the 2008 electioneering-campaign season, during which period a then-Candidate John Evans Atta-Mills was widely reported to have bitterly complained to the local Ghanaian media that some Nigerian underwriters of his presidential-election campaign, who had been illegally stumping around the country with the former University of Ghana tax-law professor, had been robbed of several million dollars in an assortment denominations of liquid cash that were obviously intended as a contract-soliciting investment, in the event of the highly possible realization of an Atta-Mills Presidency.

In the Colombian Drug Cartel Scandal, it was the name of the Mettle-Nunoo Brothers and the Ahwoi Brothers, as well, that came to the fore. And in the case of the 2024, actually 2023, John “Ford Expedition Payola” Dramani Mahama Mega-Theft of the predetermined outcome of the Johnson “The Mosquito” Asiedu-Nketia-rigged National Democratic Congress-sponsored Presidential Primary, we arrived at the estimated GH₡50 million Mahama purchase primarily based on a widely reported protest demonstration that was staged in the Greater-Accra Region, in particular, and elsewhere in the country, in which the newly elected National Democratic Congress’ Chairman of the Greater-Accra Region was widely alleged to have pocketed the GH₡50 (Fifty Cedis) that had been shelled out by the Mahama Campaign, in the dubious name of Transportation Allowance, to each and every one of the delegates registered to vote in the party’s 2024 Presidential-Election Primary.

In short, it is quite obvious that while he may not have personally intended it, nonetheless, Mr. Daniel Yaw Domelevo was actually addressing the top leadership of the National Democratic Congress who have been the most guilty of “drugifying” and “contrabandizing” Ghana’s Fourth Republican Democratic Culture. Perhaps even including himself!

*Visit my blog at: KwameOkoampaAhoofeJr

By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., PhD
Professor Emeritus, Department of English
SUNY-Nassau Community College
Garden City, New York
March 24, 2024
E-mail: [email protected]