Ekow Assafuah Needs to Get Real and Serious

Samuel Okudzeto-Ablakwa and Vincent Ekow Assafuah

The thoroughgoing corruption and scandalous profligacy in the use of public funds by Ghana’s current Foreign Affairs Minister is all too well known to a significant mass of the country’s electorate and the citizenry. So, pretending as if the murky state of the private and the personal affairs of the young man that the late former President Jeremiah “Jerry” John Rawlings once bitterly described as “a baby with sharp teeth,” among the hoodlum ranks of the morally unsavory gaggle of his peers and playmates of the ruling National Democratic Congress (NDC), is something new or an epiphanic discovery does not get the New Patriotic Party-sponsored Member of Parliament for Old Tafo Constituency, in the Kumasi Metropolis, in the Asante Region, any farther than Vincent Ekow Assafuah may probably have expected in terms of any furious or harsh public backlash or response (See “If Ablakwa Can Afford a US$15,000 Property Rent for 8 Years, then Ghanaians Must Apologize to Cecilia Dapaah - NPP MP” Modernghana.com 2/3/25).

You see, it is this kind of cynical attitude towards official corruption on the part of the cavalierly likes of Mr. Ekow Assafuah that is almost certain to ensure that the leadership of the proverbial Elephant Party is bound to remain in opposition for quite a significant while. You see, what we are dealing with here is gross fiscal indiscipline and irresponsibility and abject lack of leadership accountability of felonious and treasonable proportions, and not a minor or a simple matter of which of the leaderships of the country’s two major political parties is relatively more or less fiscally wasteful or kleptocratic than the other.

It goes without saying that telling the Parliamentary Appointments Committee Members that he had rented or been renting a house in a plush suburb of the Greater-Accra Metropolis at the ginormous rate of $15,000 (USD) per annum for some 8 years, as the then Minister-Designate for Foreign Affairs and ECOWAS Integration reportedly claimed not very long ago, does absolutely nothing to meliorate the criminal flagrancy of the decidedly self-exposed and imperiously self-betrayed former Akufo-Addo-appointed Minister for Sanitation, namely, Ms. Cecilia Abena Dapaah, in the globally publicized matter of the infamous surrogate and relative of former President John “The Gentle Giant” Agyekum-Kufuor, regarding the curious hoarding of a stash of liquid cash valued at $5 million (USD) in an assortment of foreign currency denominations, according to Mr. William Kissi Agyebeng, the Akufo-Addo-appointed Independent Special Prosecutor, in a house that Ms. Dapaah reportedly shared with her husband, described as a kinsman or a blood relative of Mr. Agyekum-Kufuor.

And by the way, contrary to what Mr. Ekow Assafuah reportedly told the host of a current affairs program on Pure-FM Radio not quite a while back, the amount of liquid cash reported to the Accra Police as having been accessed and/or tampered with by Ms. Dapaah’s female household aids was $5 million (USD), and not the $One-Million USD that Mr. Assafuah has been widely reported to have claimed in the Old Tafo MP’s Pure-FM Radio interview.

So, right off the bat, as New Yorkers are wont to say, the moral stature and the credibility of the renowned lawyer are conspicuously suspect, at the very least, and decidedly unworthy of public trust and attention, to state the unvarnished truth. As well, while, indeed, both Mr. Ablakwa’s rental of a plush residential accommodation space or building for the eye-popping cost of $15,000 (USD), per year, I suppose, and Ms. Dapaah’s patently illegal and criminal stashing of some $5 million (USD) in an assortment of foreign currency notes, in her bedroom closet, equally entail the criminal conduct of official theft and rank corruption, nevertheless, comparing these two instances of egregious misconduct and an unarguably unethical conduct on the part of Mr. Samuel Okudzeto-Ablakwa to that of the former Akufo-Addo-appointed Sanitation Minister, is prosaically akin to the proverbial comparison of apples and oranges in American political parlance.

Then also, what makes the Cecilia Abena Dapaah currency hoarding self-invoked or self-provoked scandal far more serious than the Okudzeto-Ablakwa case, regards widespread reports of the Agyekum-Kufuor protegee and former staffer of the Agyekum-Kufuor Foundation having been flagged by the Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) of the United States of America for her alleged involvement in a money-laundry scheme. Which in a practical sense is also a double-whammy or dilemma for the Agyekum-Kufuor and the Kwadwo Mpiani Faction of the New Patriotic Party, whose principal actors and operatives have not allowed the least opportunity to slip by without caustically castigating Messrs. Akufo-Addo and Mahamudu Bawumia for supposedly running the most thoroughgoing corrupt regime in Fourth-Republican Ghana.

Now, of course, with the garish coming to light of the Cecilia Dapaah Scandal, it has become incontrovertibly clear that, indeed, the Chief Corruption Engineers of the previous Akufo-Addo/Bawumia Government were actually bona fide recruits of the man who has universally gone on record as having declared official corruption in Fourth Republican Ghanaian Political Culture to be perfectly normal and a standard human behavioral practice originating from humanity’s mythological primal pair, namely, Adam and Eve.

Then also, the fact that the Airport Hills Residential Area or Community is an upscale neighborhood of the Greater-Accra Metropolis, with the value of real-estate properties ranking or rating among the highest and/or the most expensive of its kind in the country, does not necessarily mean or imply that virtually every powerful and/or influential Ghanaian politician and/or citizen resident in the Airport Hills Residential Community must, perforce, be a real-estate owner, contrary to what Mr. Ekow Assafuah would have the rest of us believe.

You see, it is quite common knowledge that widely alleged freeloading political opportunists like Mr. Ablakwa are often not in the least bit motivated to buy expensive real-estate properties such as is believed to be the case of Airport Hills Residential Community rental apartment or bungalow, especially when such accommodation can be readily accessed by the use of funds or money that has not been earned via the blood and sweat of the occupant. We have witnessed dozens of such cases at the various committees of enquiries in the country in the recent past.

So, there is absolutely nothing new here, really. What is new and peevishly bizarre, however, is this sacrilegious notion that, somehow, Ghanaians need or ought to applaud an apparently seasoned and hardened common criminal and nation-wrecker like Ms. Cecilia Abena Dapaah. Mr. Ekow Assafuah may very well need to do some image and reputation damage control in the offing. You see, Ghanaians do not elect our leaders on the basis of the relative or the comparative corruption or corruptibility of either leadership of the country’s two major political parties. Rather, we, for the most part, determine the choice of our leaders on the basis of proven performance and social responsibility. And so far, New Patriotic Party leaders like the Kumasi-Old Tafo legislator have been telling us that they have absolutely no clue about the stuff of which responsible leadership is made. What a shame!

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