The Payola Defenders

In the wake of the glaring and likely criminal prosecution of some principal “revolutionary” players of the so-called Provisional National Democratic Congress (P/NDC), in the not-too-distant future, we hope, some notorious Janus-faced bedfellows of the latter group of felonious scam-artists have taken to the Ghanaian airwaves, in hopes of deftly diffusing and tactically dissipating the steam of the inexorable forces of justice in what is destined to become the most epic judicial prosecution in Ghana's postcolonial history.

Predictably, one such defender of the outright untenable to emerge out of the proverbial woodwork, swinging with a shameless pretense to self-righteous indignation and bromide is Mr. Kwesi Pratt, Jnr., a stentorian member of the Nkrumah Corporation, otherwise known as the Convention People's Party (CPP).

The problem with Mr. Pratt's jejune attempt at diverting attention from the criminally culpable scamming of the people of Ghana is that both the man and his party have no credibility, whatsoever. For instance, it was the CPP, under its founding father, Mr. Kwame Nkrumah, that institutionalized official – or political – corruption in Ghana (see documents of the celebrated JIBOWU COMMISSION). Nkrumah would also establish a purported Ghana National Trust Fund, managed by such henchmen as Messrs. Aryeh Kumi and Yaw Djin, to front for his receivership of 10-percent “commissions” on contracts awarded by the CPP government to foreign contractors, notable among which group was Kassardjian, the road contractor (see Ofosu-Appiah's The Life and Times of J. B. Danquah; also Peter Omari's Kwame Nkrumah: The Anatomy of an African Dictatorship).

The “Insight” newspaper proprietor is also widely known to have, reportedly, fronted as an espionage decoy for the swashbuckling junta of the so-called Provisional National Defense Council (PNDC). And as recently as the past year, Mr. Pratt locked step with Mr. Rawlings in a series of vehement protest marches aimed at summarily denying the franchise to Ghanaian-born residents in the Diaspora who were, literally, chased out of their motherland by Mr. Probity and “Cement-Bag” Accountability.

And so his latest attempt to invidiously incriminate the entire country in a policy scam-artistry that primarily involved such notorious Pratt paymasters as Messrs. P. V. Obeng and J. J. Rawlings (see Ghanaweb.com 8/4/07) is quite understandable. Unfortunately for Mr. Pratt, however, just like his vigorous earlier attempt to freeze Ghana's fledgling democratic culture, this too, shall not wash.

What is rather amusing about the “Insight” editor's dastardly attempt to implicate the Kufuor Government in the SCANCEM-GHACEM payola scandal is the fact that while insisting that the NPP Government has, like Messrs. Rawlings and Obeng, as well as the latter's P/NDC regime, “benefited” from kickbacks from the Norwegian cement monopoly, the accuser also impudently acknowledges that if arraigned before a court of both the law and the human conscience to produce corroborative evidence to his outrageous claim, he, Mr. Pratt, could in no way do so.

At Akyem-Asiakwa, where yours truly partly grew up, this kind of “Prattian” prattle is called “plain poppycock.” And it is the kind of public nuisance that could well find the subject promptly locked up at the Accra mental asylum or, better yet, that of Ankaful, in the Central Region, which may be even much closer to the accuser's home-village.

The preceding notwithstanding, what, indeed, Mr. Pratt, either out of sheer spite or plain ignorance, or even outright stupidity, is alluding to is the common and patently pedestrian democratic, cultural practice of “legal” or sanctioned campaign contributions which business enterprises routinely shell out (or shed) in support of political parties that are likely to win elections, and thus critically affect, or profoundly shape, far-reaching policies verging on entrepreneurial protocol, among a host of other avenues of national endeavor.

In sum, what Mr. Pratt is sophistically attempting to do here, is deviously mix the proverbial apples and oranges in order to neutralize the likely and imminent possibility of his sponsors being brought to justice. And here also, perhaps the “Insight” editor had better be reminded that Ghanaians are a longsuffering people. In brief, we wouldn't mind hunching down and waiting for condign justice even if it should take us a millennium or one-thousand years!

The issue at stake here, as eloquently and auspiciously laid out in the ongoing Norwegian trial, in Oslo's Asker and Baerum court house, deals squarely with the criminal bribing of some Ghanaian policymakers, between the mid-1980s and mid-1990s, in order to facilitate the massive and immitigable economic exploitation of their own countrymen and women.

And so unless the “Insight” editor can point to a specific instance, or instances, in which any policymakers in the ruling New Patriotic Party (NPP) took huge sums of money in secret-coded overseas bank accounts, the notorious political prostitute had better shut up or find himself, soon enough, swamped with a class-action suit for criminal defamation.

*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].