Wasteful Purpose: Appointing Cabinet Ministers to Corporate Boards - Part 1

As a Deputy Finance Minister in the previous Mahana regime, Dr. Cassiel Ato Kwamena Baah Forson did not serve any useful or meaningful purpose. Instead, he and some of his associates got themselves callously and deliberately mired in what became infamously known as the Lemon-Ambulance Scandal, in which about 300 vehicular hulks or inoperable minivans and trucks were imported into the country from Germany on a propaganda pretext of replenishing the depleting and the abjectly poorly maintained National Ambulance Service (NAS).

The Mahama-sponsored scam would cost Ghanaian citizens and taxpayers millions of cedis and dollars that could have been more profitably and productively invested in the decrepit infrastructure of the country. But, of course, as has invariably been the case with the political track of the National Democratic Congress (NDC), infrastructural investment or development has been the least among the worries of the leadership of the National Democratic Congress for as long as any of us can remember, irrespective of which individual leader happened to be at the helm of our national affairs.

Recently retired Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of Ghana, Mr. Jones Mawulorm Dotse, could not have put it any better or more accurately and poignantly, when the Hohoe native, from Ghana’s Volta Region, described the Mahama-chaperoned leadership of the National Democratic Congress as one that was wholly and thoroughly immersed in the fraudulent and the downright criminal business enterprise of “Creating, Looting and Sharing” the collective wealth of our beloved Sovereign Democratic Republic of Ghana among themselves.

Now, once again, we are all witnessing the Gonja Mafia-commandeered National Democratic Congress back at their old game of kleptocratically divvying up the spoils of elective power among themselves and their allied cronies across the country. It was absolutely no happenstance that Mr. Samuel “Sammy” Gyamfi, the so-called National Communications Officer of the National Democratic Congress, would so obscenely capture himself on cellphone video splashing and shelling out wads of US dollar notes, the way a duck splashes about in a puddle of water, to a self-styled Christian evangelist recently,

As usual, some spin doctors of the Mahama Presidency would take to the media airwaves and make-believe outrageously as if the recent Mahama-appointed Acting Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of the Ghana GoldBod, so-called, had been deliberately set up and surreptitiously videotaped by some depraved and viciously minded political opponents and inveterate detractors in a viral internet post as a dastardly means of savagely undermining the credibility and the confidence of Ghana’s electorate and the citizenry, at large, in the ragtag John “I Have No Classmates in Ghana” Dramani Mahama 2.0 Government.

You see, characteristically, having been literally caught with their proverbial pants down, hung and all, the state-capturing leadership of the National Democratic Congress would quickly scurry to create some scapegoats among the leadership of the country’s main opposition New Patriotic Party (NPP). The stark fact of the matter, from what we have reliably gleaned from our media sources, is that it was Mr. Gyamfi himself who allegedly authorized his reckless splurging of the Ghanaian taxpayer’s money in the morally untenable manner in which the Sunyani native, from the Akufo-Addo-created Bono Region, was shown mindlessly and fatuously doing.

In the admittedly mean-spirited process and bid of Mr. Gyamfi’s most ardent and inveterate enemies and detractors to hang this “Baby with the Shark-like Teeth,” nobody seems to be looking at the proverbial big or bigger picture, in American political parlance. Which is most probably or highly likely that the portion of Mr. Gyamfi’s flagrant splurging of Ghanaian taxpayer money that made the metaphorical cut into cyberspace, was not really the beginning of such an orgiastic and opulent display of his unearned wealth at all. Very likely, the general public only witnessed the middle or, possibly, the very end of a long chain of a series of splurging sprees that epiphanic day.

In other words, no critically thinking viewers and/or observers appear to be interested in knowing or tracking down this most heinous act of official criminality to where it actually began. We are here, of course, alluding to the total amount of US dollar currency notes that the 38-year-old recent graduate of the Ghana Law School had on him in his SUV on the day that the aforesaid videotape was shot and uploaded into cyberspace. Even more significantly, Ghanaians need to know about the details of the Assets Declaration Profile documented by Mr. Gyamfi, on the orders of President Mahama and deposited with the Office of the Auditor-General.

You see, the Declaration of Assets by our public officials needs to be made readily available and accessible to each and every Ghanaian tax-paying citizen, under the Akufo-Addo-promulgated and US Copycat Freedom of Information Act. It should not be a mere good-game talking gimmickry by which the leadership of the supposedly “Born Again” Mahama 2.0 Government play it fast and loose with those who elected them into office and are also squarely responsible for the payment of their salaries and emoluments.

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