Ablakwa, the Mills-Mahama-Hatched STX Scam Cost Ghanaian Taxpayers $250 Million USD

As Deputy Education Minister to the now-Vice-Candidate Naana Jane Opoku-Agyemang, Mr. Samuel Okudzeto-Ablakwa led the morally self-righteous and criminally unconscionable campaign that summarily abrogated the age-old Academic and Professional Research Allowances regularly paid to the nation’s public university and college lecturers and professors. Instead, Prof. Naana Opoku-Agyemang and her ministerial deputy and their associates and assigns decided to play hardball politics with the disbursement of the aforementioned Tertiary Academies’ Teachers’ Professional Research Allowances by centralizing the same under the jurisdiction of the Mahama-constituted Ministry of Education and, in effect, the National Democratic Congress (NDC), so that the key operatives of the latter political establishment could closely monitor which card-carrying professorial associates and affiliates of the NDC got awarded this hitherto purely merit-based scholarships and research allowances.

At the time, the strategic gimmickry of a rationale sold to the Ghanaian people was that the Mahama-led government of the National Democratic Congress woefully lacked the wherewithal to sedulously pursue the long-established protocol for the nondiscriminatory disbursement of the Professional Research and Teaching Allowances. Meanwhile, as it shortly became public knowledge upon the inglorious exit of the Mahama regime in January 2017, at least half of the members of the Mahama cabinet were drawing home double salaries on a monthly or biweekly basis for adding absolutely no benefit or value to the social and the economic development of our beloved Sovereign Democratic Republic of Ghana.

In short, there is absolutely nothing morally and/or politically redeeming benefit that comes with the purely self-serving decision by the Serial and the Dynastic Presidential Candidate of the National Democratic Congress, to wit, Candidate-General John “European Airbus Payola” Dramani Mahama to, once again, re-field or rename Prof. Naana Jane Opoku-Agyemang as his running-mate for the watershed 2024 Presidential Election. Naana Opoku-Agyemang is just as morally depraved, conniving and hideously collusive and complicit as the rest of the hoodlum pack of thievish career politicians who make up the overwhelming majority of the leadership of the presently main opposition National Democratic Congress. Remember it was this first female Vice-Chancellor of any Ghanaian public university or tertiary academy who wrote the preface to Prof. Kwamena Ahwoi’s dirt-digging attack on the late Founding-Father of the National Democratic Congress, titled “Working with Rawlings” (2020).

She is absolutely no different from the rest of the erstwhile female Mahama cabinet appointees, led by Mrs. Betty Mould-Iddrisu and Nana Oye Lithur, to name only a couple, who euphorically cheered on the morally inexcusable and heinously criminal threat by the Mahama-sponsored Montie Three or Montie Trio of Media Goons and Terrorists who vowed to have then-Chief Justice of the august Supreme Court of Ghana (SCOG), Mrs. Georgina Theodora Wood, sexually violated, unless the veteran former law-enforcement officer of the Ghana Police Service (GPS) allowed the Mahama-appointed and illegally transferred Chairperson of the Electoral Commission (EC), formerly Chairperson of the National Commission for Civic Education (NCCE), Mrs. Charlotte Kesson-Smith Osei, to permit the use of Apex Court-prohibited personal identification cards and or documents in the 2016 General Election and, in effect, the illegal and the treasonable enfranchisement of non-Ghanaian citizens.

Brazenly insulting the intelligence of the overwhelming majority of Ghana’s electorate and the citizenry in the runup to the landmark and the watershed 2024 Presidential Election is highly unlikely to gel or work to the desired effect. You see, what the overwhelming majority of Ghanaian citizens and voters are direly in need of are competent and visionary leaders, not mere gender tokenism or the selection of a presidential running-mate primarily based on the sexual and/ or the gender attribute of the subject so chosen or selected. We also need to remember, as already adumbrated at the very beginning of this article, that it was under the ministerial and the executive watch of Prof. Naana Opoku-Agyemang that the age-old Teacher-Trainees’ Allowance was summarily abrogated, at about the same time that the Teaching and the Research Allowances for lecturers and professors at the country’s public universities and colleges were also summarily scrapped.

In short, she may be a very book-smart woman or even lambent-witted academic heavyweight. But it also goes without saying that Naana Opoku-Agyemang is a nominally well-educated woman who has absolutely no use and/or respect for young teacher trainees, unless the latter category of budding educators also happens to be her own children and grandchildren or relatives. No levelheaded or socially and professionally responsible Ghanaian citizen could make the same morally and politically unenviable pronouncement about the personality and the professional caliber of Dr. Yaw Osei-Adutwum – popularly known as Mr. Laptop – the man who has been fiercely fighting to make the quality of Fourth Republican Ghanaian public education a glorious sight to behold and the kind of globally respectable education to have.

Anyway, in his latest populist-propaganda spiel against the Akufo-Addo Administration, and in particular the widely presumed next President of our beloved Sovereign Democratic Republic of Ghana, the North-Tongu National Democratic Congress-sponsored Member of Parliament does not offer any forensically credible evidence of any wrongdoing entailing the very legitimate decision by the Chief Executive Officer of the Public Procurement Authority (PPA), Mr. Frank Mante, to permit the sole-sourcing of a government contract, unlike the globally infamous case of the forensically foolproof Martin Amidu-procured evidence of treasonous criminality involving the then-Vice-President John Dramani Mahama and the management of the three-nation owned European Airbus Company, in which an estimated $200-$500 million (USD) may very well have been lost or indirectly extorted from Ghanaian taxpayers in exchange for the relatively diddly bribery sum of €5 million.

Now, single-sourcing the cash equivalent of $18 million (USD) is a far cry from having Ghanaian taxpayers fork up a mind-blowing $250 million (USD) to a foreign-owned company for a breach of contract for work that was never done, in the case of the Mahama-brokered STX Scam with the South Koreans (See “Bawumia’s Manifesto Team Member Grabs Juicy Single-Sourced GHS245 Million Contract – Ablakwa” Modernghana.com 4/4/24). There is this peevish sense of thievish entitlement on the part of the leadership of the National Democratic Congress that Mr. Samuel “Thirty-Thousand-Dollar Car Wash” Okudzeto Ablakwa is obligated to explain to Ghanaian citizens and voters, Pronto!

*Visit my blog at: KwameOkoampaAhoofeJr

By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., PhD
Professor Emeritus, Department of English
SUNY-Nassau Community College
Garden City, New York
April 4, 2024
E-mail: [email protected]