First-Class Travel Ban for Ministers Comes Much Rather Late but Laudable

The recent first-class travel ban reportedly issued by President John Dramani Mahama, while swearing in some ministerial appointees on Friday, February 7, 2025, comes about a decade late as a progressive policy initiative. We are informed that Mr. Mahama issued his directive at the Jubilee House. It comes rather much too late because during his first term in office, ministerial appointees and their deputies, as well as presidential staffers, so-called, and an assortment of government-appointed executives were widely known to routinely travel first class on airliners in and out of the country, almost as if money in the erstwhile Gold Coast literally grew on trees and cassava farms in the Volta Region (See “Mahama Bans First-Class Travel for Government Appointees, Ministers” Ghanaweb.com 2/7/25).

It would a great eye-opener, if some of our investigative reporters and journalists thoroughly researched the number of flights taken in and out of the country under the watch of President Mahama between July 2012 and January 7, 2017 in the first-class compartments of the various airlines or airliners and the amount of money that such fiscally profligate flights cost Ghanaian taxpayers over the same period. Of particular and special interest here would be how much less money such flights or travels would have cost Ghanaian taxpayers, if the same public officials and government appointees had traveled by either Business or First Class on the same flights.

Of particular infamy and/or notoriety in this area of flagrantly wasteful spending of Ghanaian taxpayer money was Mr. Samuel Okudzeto-Ablakwa, a Deputy Education Minister in the first Mahama Government, who was widely alleged to be in the rampant and riotous habit of jetting in and out of the country on first-class flights, mostly on British Airways Jetliners. Equally significant to note, the National Democratic Congress-sponsored Member of Parliament for North-Tongu Constituency, in the Volta Region, did not only travel in and out of the country on First-Class taxpayer-underwritten tickets, he was also known to occupy whole rows of seats all by himself. Which means that Mr. Ablakwa often traveled at the cost of at least three or four passengers per flight. Now, multiply each roundtrip ticket by two, and it at once becomes quite obvious and crystal clear that for Mr. Ablakwa, executive and ministerial appointments offered a prime opportunity to recklessly, irresponsibly and criminally milk the Ghanaian taxpayer.

Which is why it was rather peevishly amusing to see the former Atta-Mills surrogate judicial scofflaw constitute himself into a one-man auditor-general’s department of the air-travel costs of former President Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo. Fortunately, presently, it is Mr. Ablakwa whose “redneck” is literally smack on the chopping block of public accountability and scrutiny, now that he has been appointed Ghana’s Minister for Foreign Affairs. We shall be studiously watching his every move and flight in and out of the country on commercial flights, as well as Ghana’s Presidential Jetliner, and we shall not hesitate to call the shots as we see and deem the same. We need to, however, quickly point out that the real problem here has far less to do with the category of flights that our ministerial appointees and public officials take in and out of the country, per se, but the fact of how many of such flights are really of utmost significance to both the terms of reference of these executive and ministerial appointees, that is, the fact of whether these air travels can be aptly classified as “Essential” or “Non-Essential” travels or flights.

And by the way, the same sort of research could be conducted by some of our fiscally and statistically inclined journalists with specialization in foreign travels vis-a-vis air-travel expenditures racked up by the previous twice, consecutively elected government of the New Patriotic Party (NPP)-sponsored President Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo. Ultimately, of the greatest guilt vis-a-vis lavish and profligate air travels are nearly all of our Five Fourth-Republican Presidents, namely, the late former President Jeremiah “Jerry” John Rawlings, former President John “The Gentle Giant” Agyekum-Kufuor, the late President John Evans Atta-Mills, former President Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo and, of course, the twice nonconsecutively elected President John “I Have No Classmates in Ghana” Dramani Mahama.

It was President Rawlings, the career coup-plotting and “revolutionary” ethnic-cleansing former flight-lieutenant of the Ghana Air Force who converted the country’s military jets into a playtoy or an “Aboboyaa” for the Rawlings Family and the Agbotui-Tsikata Clan. Not very long ago, for example, Dr. Zanetor Agyeman-Rawlings, the eldest daughter of the late Butcher of Sogakope and Mrs. Nana Konadu Agyeman-Rawlings, told the nationally humiliating and embarrassing story of how her father used to teach her how to fly on one of the jets belonging to the Ghana Air Force, and would on occasion pretend to be having a heart attack in order to gauge the reaction of his daughter. Now, the Dear Reader may be well aware of the fact that these jets do not come cheap like second-hand clothes from the recently conflagrated Kantamanto Market in Accra. And neither does aviation fuel come as cheaply as automobile or diesel fuel. But, of course, a pathologically self-absorbed Dr. Zanetor Agyeman-Rawlings did not in the least seem to appreciate the bizarre and the down politically felonious implications of her “joke.”

He has not been at the helm of the country’s affairs for even two months; and yet, already, the Bole-Bamboi native from the Akufo-Addo-created Savannah Region has taken more trips outside the country than many a leader of some of the most economically and industrially advanced economies and countries in the world. We definitely need to apply the rules of fiscal discipline here. But whether such pontifical policy proclamations will become successful, squarely depends on the man whose Jubilee House’s desk is where the proverbial buck must stop. We sincerely want President Mahama to succeed in his publicly pledged determination to take the country at least a notch further up the Global Development Index (GDI) than was admirably achieved by his immediate predecessor.

Unfortunately, the grim and the daunting fact also remains that we have heard many of the same platitudinous pledges before, such as the 10-percentage reduction in the take-home salaries of cabinet appointees of the previous Mahama regime vis-a-vis the development of the so-called CHPS - Community Health Services Facilities - only to discover to our chagrin, via the findings of the Auditor-General Daniel Yaw Domelevo’s Post-Mahama 1.0 Regime that, in reality. Absolutely no ministerial paycheck reduction had taken place at all.

Rather, what clearly amounted to “Robbing Peter to Pay Paul” had been clandestinely established by the Mahama Posse via which these widely touted patriotic and sacrificial National Democratic Congress’ Apostles of Probity, Accountability, Transparency and Justice were actually taking home double salaries at the criminal expense of Ghanaian citizens and taxpayers. An oblique and much earlier discovery and exposé by some sleuthing staff members of the United States’ Embassy in Accra, at the time headed by Mr. Robert Jackson, from the US State of Arkansas, would result in a rather brazen and bizarre confrontation between the US Embassy and the Mahama Government, represented at the time by Ms. Hannah Tetteh, Ghana’s extant Foreign Minister, and Mr. Samuel Okudzeto-Ablakwa, the recently named Ghana’s Minister for Foreign Affairs.

Among the Akan-speaking majority population of Ghana, we have a saying that :“A good market day can be readily determined very early in the morning,” when the traders arrive in the market square and begin arranging their produce and merchandise. “We live to see,” as our elders have often been known to remark.

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