Come On, Be Our Guest, Sam George!

Americans have a wise and common saying that: “Whatever goes around also comes around in due course.” It is an obvious variation on the Universal Law of the Boomerang. That was what streamed across my mind, when I chanced across the news story in which the National Democratic Congress-sponsored Member of Parliament for Ningo-Prampram Constituency, in the Greater-Accra Region, was alleged to have cautioned key operatives of the outgoing Akufo-Addo Administration against the very inviting temptation of signing and backdating contracts that kleptocratic National Democratic Congress’ operatives like the man who was once publicly disowned by a then-Incumbent President John “I Have No Classmates in Ghana” Dramani Mahama are highly unlikely to benefit from.

Yes, the then-Incumbent President Mahama had publicly disowned the so-called “Mr. Sam George” for daring to rudely and boorishly poke fun at a wheelchair-bound Mr. Ivor Kobina Greenstreet, the Presidential Candidate of the Rump-Convention People’s Party (R-CPP), in the heated runup to the 2016 Presidential Election, because Mr. Greenstreet had dared to publicly challenge the Mahama regime to identify a single worthwhile national development program or project undertaken by the now-President-Elect Mahama in the four years prior to the 2016 Presidential Election.

The Ningo-Prampram parliamentarian’s main beef here is that contracts signed by democratically ousted governments on the eve of their exits are highly unlikely to significantly benefit their immediate successors by way of backdoor contractual giveaway payolas of the kind that the London Serious Fraud Court and the French and the American Commercial Fraud Court Systems criminally implicated Mr. Mahama in the runup to the 2020 Presidential Election, which then Special Prosecutor Martin ABK Amidu publicly and flagrantly refused to prosecute, both on partisan and geo-ethnic grounds, as well as his stunning discovery and the prompt aborting of the Kenneth Ofori-Atta-crafted and the staunchly Akufo-Addo-backed Agyapadie Mineral Investment Mega-Heist (See “We won't honor backdated contracts signed after elections — Sam George warns” Modernghana.com 12/12/24). In the past such contractual “palm-greasers” were known as “Ten-Percents,” because they often entailed the awardees “gifting” the signers of such contracts on behalf of Ghana 10-percent of the total monetary value of such agreements, which, in effect, meant the exponential inflation of the value of such contractual agreements at the expense of overburdened Ghanaian citizens and taxpayers. This is the crux of Ghana’s prolonged and perennial underdevelopment and humongous debt burdens.

Now, the problem that the cynical and the hypocritical likes of the Ningo-Prampram lawmaker have on their hands is that the departing operatives of the twice, consecutively elected Akufo-Addo-led government of the New Patriotic Party is highly likely to pay their rascally NDC counterparts in kind, which obviously means that the Elephant Party’s operatives are also likely to swamp the incoming Mahama government with post-election contracts of the kinds initialled by the kleptocratic and the grossly, administratively incompetent likes of Mr. Mahama Ayariga, at the time the Mahama-appointed Minister for the Environment, Science and Technology, and Mr. Alexander Kofi Mensah Mould, the Mahama-appointed Executive-Director of the Ghana National Petroleum Corporation (GNPC).

There is absolutely nothing that Fortune Hunters like the Nigerian-born Mr. Samuel George Nartey - aka Sam George - will be able to do about such perfectly normal tit-for-tat, retributive, contractual compacts initialled or entered into by their departing immediate predecessors, for the simple reason of established precedent. Which, in effect, means that even if such strategically sandbagging contracts are fiercely challenged in court, it is highly unlikely that the outcomes would favor the precedent-setting plaintiffs.

Now, the downside to adamantly refusing to honor these New Patriotic Party-initialled contracts by their incoming National Democratic Congress’ Mahama appointees and executive operatives and immediate successors, is that it will likely lead to the exponential ballooning of the already overburdening weight of the much-maligned Judgment-Debt Arrears, which continue to significantly bog down the pace of Ghana’s development because successive governments have had to spend huge chunks of our revenues or fiscal or capital and monetary resources in paying off our ever-mounting external debt obligations.

The most effective method or means of definitively resolving this seemingly intractable problem is for the incoming payola-addicted and State-Capturing Mahama Posse to Experience a Pauline Type of a Damascus Epiphany and a Christocentric Revolutionary Turnaround by studiously embarking on what a steely determined State-Capturing Akufo-Addo Government had brazenly and conspicuously signalled to the overwhelming majority of Ghana’s electorate that had twice elected it that the Akufo-Addo-led Government has been witheringly and democratically ousted because although the presently ruling New Patriotic Party had fervidly been about an unprecedented and a comprehensive social-intervention oriented development of the country, it had not taken seriously and/or studiously the equally significant task of fighting rank official corruption which, by the way, unbeknownst to the overwhelming majority of Ghanaian citizens and taxpayers, was an unwritten but an apparently indelibly etched compact between the leadership of Ghana’s two major political parties, namely, the outgoing New Patriotic Party, and the incoming National Democratic Congress, as one of the providentially sanctioned avenues for the kinds of perquisites that come with wisely investing a significant portion of one’s personal and corporate fortunes in the sort of Pseudo-Theocratic Political Kingdom that Ghana’s most globally renowned and celebrated leader, namely, the immortalized President Kwame Nkrumah, is widely known to have “wisely” and “prophetically” counseled in the wake of Ghana’s reassertion of her inalienable sovereignty from British Colonial Imperialism on March 6, 1957.

In sum, the vaingloriously self-important likes of the Ningo-Prampram National Democratic Congress-sponsored Member of Parliament or lawmaker can studiously monitor the “Ghana-gov” cyber platform all they like or want but absolutely to no avail. Because, ultimately, what matters here is precedent in the way that some of these apparently unsavory backdoor warring between the key players of the country’s two major political parties had been waged in the past and continues to be presently waged, almost wholly based on protocol or precedence, and not according to the capricious whims of a few meanspirited partisan bullies like Sam George, who suppose the wealth and the collective resources of our beloved Sovereign Democratic Republic of Ghana to be their personal and especial preserve. This is where matters presently stand, Dear Reader, even as we speak.

By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., PhD
Professor Emeritus, Department of English
SUNY-Nassau Community College
Garden City, New York
December 13, 2024
E-mail: [email protected]