There Was an “Asante Project” before there Was an “Akyem Project” – Part 6

Nana Akufo-Addo’s dismissive attitude and denial of the widely circulated “Agyapadeε” Document as one that horrifically encapsulates the long-planned and politically treasonable attempt by some members of the Ofori-Panyin and/or the Ofori-Atta Clan to systematically take over the wealth and the collective resources of our beloved Sovereign Democratic Republic of Ghana at large, leaves several critical questions unanswered (See “Akufo-Addo Speaks on the ‘Agyapadie’ Document” Ghanaweb.com 8/1/24).

First of all, the President’s argument that the surfacing or resurfacing of the “Agyapadeε” Document is the characteristic, seasonal and the perennially and the systematically calculated ploy by the leadership of the country’s main opposition National Democratic Congress (NDC) to sabotage the progressive national-development agenda of the ruling New Patriotic Party (NPP), does a diddly little to absolutely nothing to convincingly explain or forensically and credibly refute the Kenneth Ofori-Atta and the Gabriel Asare Otchere-Darko-crafted “Agyapa Investment Heritage” Mega-Scam and Scandal that came to light in the late summer of 2020, with barely four months before the watershed General Election of the latter year.

As many of us vividly recall, caught flatfooted with their pants down, hung and all, as Americans are wont to say, Gabriel “Gabby” Asare Otchere-Darko – the Mahama bosom friend and act-alike – and the putative unofficial Prime Minister of the Akufo-Addo Government, a title conferred on him by the Serial and the Dynastic Presidential Candidate of the National Democratic Congress, would be widely quoted by the media to have cavalierly alleged that this was not the very first time that the mineral wealth and the natural resources of the country were being scheduled to be mortgaged offshore by the key operatives of any democratically elected Fourth-Republican Government in the country.

The maternal cousin of Nana Akufo-Addo would also be further and extensively quoted by the media to have alleged that the very first of such patently egregious and criminal attempt to mortgage the mineral wealth of the country, for the especial benefit of a few powerful and influential politicians and the members of their families, relatives and associates was during the tenure of the late President John Evans “I Have No Time for Kufuor’s Asante Projects” Atta-Mills, and then-Vice-President John “I Have No Classmates in Ghana” Dramani Mahama. And, furthermore, that Dr. Kwabena Duffuor, the late President Jeremiah “Jerry” John Rawlings-appointed former Governor of the nation’s Central Treasury, the Bank of Ghana, and at the time of the very first attempted “Agyapa Heritage Investment Deal” or, properly speaking, Mega-Heist, the Atta-Mills-appointed Minister of Finance.

Mr. Otchere-Darko would, however, not let on to the general Ghanaian public precisely what had gone awry as a result of which the first “Agyapa Heritage Investment” Mega-Scam and Heist had, apparently, fallen through the proverbial cracks. Now, the upshot of the preceding, as the widely alleged proprietor of the so-called Asaase Radio FM Network related the same, was implicitly that there was absolutely nothing of a big deal, as New Yorkers are wont to say, about the Ofori-Atta, Otchere-Darko and Company-authored “Agyapa Heritage Investment Deal.” The unstated subtext here was that, after all, this was all a sheer matter of brinkmanship or an open contest of official thievery between the leaderships of the country’s two major political parties, namely, the self-designated social-intervention oriented New Patriotic Party, on the one hand, and the main opposition National Democratic Congress, on the other.

Now, before any political cynic attempts to cavalierly impute a hearsay spin to the preceding narrative, we must emphatically underscore the fact that the outbreak of the 2020 Ofori-Atta and Otchere-Darko and Company-authored “Agyapa Heritage Deal,” ostensibly intended to rake in a critical mass of national-development funding for a mineral-rich but woefully under-resourced Ghana was publicly exposed by an otherwise largely ineffective Akufo-Addo-appointed Independent Special Prosecutor, to wit, Mr. Martin ABK Amidu, an Atta-Mills-expelled Attorney-General and Minister of Justice who, until his widely envisaged rehabilitative appointed as Special Prosecutor by President Akufo-Addo, was being hounded and persecuted by the top leadership of the National Democratic Congress, led by the now-Cansidate-General John “Gnassingbe” Dramani Mahama, by the public confession of Martin Amidu himself.

In short, what made the “Agyapa Investment Heritage Scam” even more indelibly damning, was the brazen and the obdurate attempt by the President, Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo, to ram this godforsaken package down the throats of Ghana’s Parliament, especially the Members of the New Patriotic Party’s Parliamentary Majority Caucus at the time, even after the “Agyapa Deal” had been clearly and conspicuously exposed to be a veritable criminal enterprise, with absolutely no worthwhile financial benefits for Ghanaian citizens at large, except for the handful of the kleptocratic principal architects of this most ignoble and economically genocidal enterprise.

In the latter instance, the “Agyapa Heritage Investment Scam” was significantly no different from the equally criminal AMERI Energy Deal, originally brokered by the previous kleptocratic Mahama regime and suavely cooked with further hairbrained magnitude of contractual criminality by then Akufo-Addo-appointed Energy Minister, Mr. Boakye Agyarko, the sometime National Presidential Campaign Manager of a then-Candidate Akufo-Addo, and literally rubberstamped by a cavalier and heavily dependent Chief Executive of State, who did not seem to have any competent sense of supervisory leadership skills. Even worse was the very rude and the flat and the brazen refusal of Mr. Boakye Agyarko to decently and responsibly resign his post, once it became evidently clear that that latter was even far worse than his equally dismissed immediate predecessor. A visibly disappointed and agitated Nana Akufo-Addo would literally be forced to fire his sometime widely tipped Presidential Chief-of-Staff. This is a curious and a rare event in the executive history of the country that may very well need to be critically interrogated, perhaps even as the topic of a doctoral dissertation on official corruption in Fourth-Republican Ghana.

Having rather blasphemously and imperiously styled himself as “The Most Incorruptible Fourth Republican Ghanaian Leader,” President Akufo-Addo would shortly be royally exposed by his own Independent Special Prosecutor, Martin Amidu, as what the latter at the time harshly termed as “The Mother-Serpent of Official Corruption in Ghana.” Even so, Nana Akufo-Addo has, in fact, always been in the jolly company of such narcissistic and pathologically kleptomaniacal kleptocrats as the late President John Evans Atta-Mills, whom Martin Amidu early this year shockingly exposed in his three-part lecture presentation series to the administrators, faculty and the students on the Tamale Campus of the University for Development Studies (UDS), for having actually personally engineered the globally infamous GH₡51.2 million criminal fleecing of Ghanaian taxpayers with the treasonable complicity of then Attorney-General Betty Mould-Iddrisu.

As well, for good or ill, Nana Akufo-Addo has kept the jolly company, courtesy of Cousin Gabriel “Gabby” Asare Otchere-Darko, of the twice-defeated, one-term former President John “European Airbus SE Payola” Dramani Mahama, better known as the Savannah Accelerated Development Authority (SADA) Gravy-Train Driver and, of course, the State-Property Cannibalizing globally acclaimed Founding-Father of the National Democratic Congress, to wit, Chairman Jeremiah “Jerry” John Rawlings, of the $5 million (USD) soliciting Gen. Sani Abacha public relations propaganda infamy. As my beloved late father and an Akufo-Addo cousin was fond of saying: “Nobody can frame you up for a crime which you really did not intend to commit.”

My father was in great awe of the wit of his immortalized granduncle and the putative Doyen of Gold Coast and Modern Ghanaian Politics. But he also firmly believed that what the much younger President Kwame Nkrumah lacked in terms of wit or intellectual prowess was more than compensated for by the genius leadership foresight of the globally celebrated “African Show Boy.” The human tongue, our elders have often said, does not rot.

*Visit my blog at: KwameOkoampaAhoofeJr

By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., PhD
Professor Emeritus, Department of English
SUNY-Nassau Community College
Garden City, New York
August 5, 2024
E-mail: [email protected]