Not So Fast, P. V.!

I have adequately commented on the raging SCANCEM-GHACEM payola scandal, particularly the judicially incidental Ghanaian side of it, so I will not belabor the earlier points, or questions, that I raised in this write-up. The reference here, however, is equally significant, being that one of the alleged principal Ghanaian players – or are they scam-artists? – has just issued what appears to be a thinly-veiled threat, regarding his intention to launching a lawsuit against some critically-thinking practitioners in the Ghanaian media who have aptly and boldly discussed the issue.

I suppose, perhaps, Mr. P. V. Obeng is still morbidly caught in a time warp. The sometime “Special Advisor” to Mr. J. J. Rawlings seems to have forgotten that it is a wholly new day on the Ghanaian political landscape, and significantly the fact that there no longer exists the odious Criminal Libel Code, which Mr. Obeng and his former boss routinely used to either summarily silence or intimidate intelligent Ghanaian media practitioners into stultifying submission not quite long ago.

Perhaps Mr. Obeng had better be reminded that this new era is called a “democratic dispensation,” and that in the latter era, it is the responsibility of intelligent and patriotic citizens to demand authentic “probity and accountability” of their leaders, both those who are still actively engaged and those who have either retired or disengaged from the mainstream political arena. And this is of signal necessity because whatever Ghanaians have been able to achieve or not been able to achieve directly correlates with whom they have had for leadership during the past half-century of the country's re-assertion of her sovereignty from England. And on this score, it goes without saying that Mr. Paul Victor Obeng has been smack-dab central to the shaping of Ghana's destiny during the last generation, and that the impact of his collaborative participation in the sanguinary junta of the so-called Provisional National Democratic Congress (P/NDC) shall continue to impact the lives of Ghanaians for a considerable time to come.

In other words, his mere parting of the proverbial ways with the political juggernaut that has made him what he is today, for good or ill, does not automatically exonerate – or even exculpate – Mr. Obeng from the untold grief and hardship that his willful collaboration with the likes of Messrs. Rawlings and Tsikata has visited upon the heads and shoulders of both innocent and unsuspecting Ghanaians.

In an article titled “P. V. Obeng Breaks Silence,” the former putative Prime Minister of the PNDC vehemently protests his up-to-the-neck involvement with SCANCEM, the Norwegian cement-manufacturing monopoly and owner of GHACEM, currently embroiled in a payola trial in Oslo, on the rather specious and outright untenable grounds that any “contractual” moneys that he, Mr. Obeng, received from GHACEM's parent company occurred post-1996, when our subject of discourse was no longer a working member of the Rawlings regime.

Interestingly, what Mr. Obeng tactically and deviously skirts is the fact that in 1996, when he claims to have set up his anonymous “consortium” (whatever that means), the P/NDC was still very much in firm control of Ghanaian politics; and so it would be unpardonably preposterous for anyone to assume that his mere parting of the ways, as it were, with the Rawlings government – for whatever reasons and on whatever terms – left Mr. Obeng absolutely bereft of any political connections or influence with/on the aforementioned government.

For all that anyone cares about, Mr. Obeng may well have left the P/NDC precisely to set up the mechanism that facilitated the alleged payola that SCANCEM court documents detail about the heavy involvement of Messrs. Obeng and Rawlings, as well as the latter's wife.

In sum, the Ghana Government has an overriding interest and obligation in establishing exactly what sort of relationship existed between Messrs. Obeng and Rawlings and, perhaps, other yet-to-be-identified principal Ghanaian players, while Mr. Obeng was a senior member of the P/NDC regime. Indeed, the fact that Mr. Obeng claims to have secured two lucrative contracts with SCANCEM, shortly after leaving the Rawlings government – 1997 and 1998 – is quite beside the point. What is materially significant here is the fact that Mr. Obeng's “capitalistic” involvement with SCANCEM does not square up with his much-vaunted Socialist credentials, an ideological instrument which, together with Mr. Rawlings, Mr. Obeng summarily appropriated – or rather, manipulated – to swiftly dispatch his enemies – both real and perceived in the Ghanaian business community – to the gallows, as well as to other forms of human misery.

It should also be of keen interest to the Government, the fact that SCANCEM appears to have exclusively engaged the consultancy services of Mr. Obeng, a major “former player” in the Rawlings government rather than another wholly private Ghanaian business consultant. And here, of course, the unmistaken allusion is to the justiciable – or culpable – practice of “Insider Trading.”

In fine, Mr. Obeng needs to sit up and seriously think up something more cogent and legally acceptable than sophomorically and ineffectually attempting to silence enquiring minds with the patently vacuous threat of a lawsuit.

*Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D., teaches English and Journalism at Nassau Community College of the State University of New York, Garden City. He is the author of “The Tower Mafia,” a forthcoming account on the anti-African and anti-immigrant culture wars in the American academy. E-mail: [email protected].