Wasteful Purpose: Appointing Cabinet Ministers to Corporate Boards - Part 2

But that the Sammy Gyamfi videotaped scandalous case of official splurging or overt corruption is not wholly an isolated incident but a bipartisan act of brazen criminality, has already been brought to light by even New Patriotic Party (NPP) stalwarts like Mr. Ernest Kofi Owusu-Bempah, the crossover former partisan of the defunct Nana Konadu Agyeman-Rawlings-fangled National Democratic Party (NDP), the party founded by Ghana’s longest-reigning First Lady and De-Facto Co-President with her husband and the universally acclaimed Founding-Father of the National Democratic Congress (NDC), to wit, the late former President Jeremiah “Jerry” John Rawlings, whose presidential ambition would be deliberately and strategically killed by the Mahama-festooned and garlanded Dr. Kwadwo Afari-Gyan in a deviously calculated gambit that makes the present Chairperson of Ghana’s Electoral Commission, the Akufo-Addo-appointed Mrs. Jean Adukwei Mensa, seem like an Angel specially dispatched to Ghana by Yagbonwura Kwame Gonja’s Divine Providence, that is, the same Supernatural Entity or Phenomenon that so opportunely liquidated an extant incumbent President John Evans “Atta-Woyome” Mills, so as to auspiciously make way for the arrival of Ghana’s First Postcolonial-born President and Leader.

Now, I deliberately highlighted the quite at once intricate and intriguing political and ideological background of Mr. Ernest Owusu-Bempah, in order to underscore the fact that the former Akufo-Addo-appointed Public Relations Director of the Ghana Gas Company Limited is a man and a savvy character and a politician who has seen it all and played all sides of the country’s political and ideological spectrum. And significant to note here as well is the fact that, according to Mr. Owusu-Bempah, the obscenely opulent display of putatively unearned income and wealth by the National Communications Officer of the presently ruling Mahama-chaperoned National Democratic Congress, was all too commonplace and even more profligate under the previous Akufo-Addo-led government of the New Patriotic Party.

Even more disturbingly scandalous, Mr. Owusu-Bempah tells us, is that under the previous Akufo-Addo regime, party stalwarts recklessly displayed clearly unearned wealth in such a manner that any visitor to the country would have immediately come to the conclusion that each and every key operative of the New Patriotic Party owned a US Dollar-Printing Machine in the basement or the bedroom closets of their homes. He did not use precisely the words of the preceding narrative but the striking implication of the same was simply unmistakable. Which, at the end of the day, inescapably boils down to the fact that fundamentally speaking, there is absolutely no difference in leadership morality and general conduct between the key operatives of the presently ruling National Democratic Congress and the previous Akufo-Addo-led government of the New Patriotic Party.

It is all a simple matter of the level of one’s tolerance for official corruption. Still, it goes without saying that the Sammy Gyamfi Tar-Baby Syndrome is likely to remain with the leadership of the Mahama-led National Democratic Congress for quite a considerable while. For example, over the weekend - as of this writing - President Mahama was reported by the media to have showered sheaves of crispy currency notes on a dancer - a professional dancer, one presumes - in Dodowa, in the Greater-Accra Region. We are told that it was during his participation in the celebration of a festival.

Now, this is an all-too-commonplace occurrence of the demonstration of one’s appreciation for a masterful performance among Ghanaians, and a gesture that ought not to have attracted the sort of media attention that forced President Mahama to painstakingly, and perhaps irritable as well, to explain that, indeed, it was true that he had gifted the graceful “Dodowa Dancer” several fresh or crispy currency notes. However, unlike his protege, namely, Mr. Sammy Gyamfi, our multimillionaire President had only shelled out a few cedi currency notes which amounted to nothing more than Five-Hundred Ghanaian Cedis, which converts into a relatively diddly Forty American Dollars.

Which is absolutely not in any way to suggest that the twice, nonconsecutively elected President Mahama has not already made himself adequately infamous with his unrivaled lackluster leadership and managerial track record of being promiscuously on the take for payolas, as perennially and publicly attested by Mr. Martin ABK Amidu, Ghana’s longest-serving Deputy Attorney-General and Deputy Minister of Justice, and one of the shortest-serving substantive Attorney-General and Minister of Justice, in the globally infamous European Airbus SE Payola Racket.

Now, on the question of the appointment of the Finance Minister to the Board-of-Directors of the Cocoa-Marketing Board - dubiously redesignated as CocoBod - about the best remark or comment that could be made here, is the fact that the riotously rampant naming or appointment of party stalwarts and cronies to these corporate boards has become another avenue for President Mahama and his minions and subalterns to wastefully squander the scarce fiscal resources of the country among themselves.

Ghanaians have an inalienable constitutional right to know precisely why a “Fully Employed” Finance Minister, who also serves as a Parliamentary Representative for the Ajumako-Enyan- Essiam Constituency, in the Central Region, could diligently and efficiently serve on the Board-of-Directors of the Cocoa-Marketing Board. If any cabinet or ministerial appointee deserves to serve on the Board-of-Directors of CocoBod or the Cocoa-Marketing Board, it is obviously the Minister of Food and Agriculture, Mr. Eric Opoku, and not the Finance Minister, who has scandalously proven himself, thus far, to be woefully incapable of facilitating the necessary industrialization and the prompt and the immediate long-overdue diversification of the multi-billion cedi and dollar cocoa industry.

What is more, during his recent parliamentary-confirmation hearing as Minister-Designate for Finance, Dr. Cassiel Ato Forson scandalously demonstrated his abject lack of aptitude and any economically refreshing ideas for the radical and the imperative retooling of the Cocoa Industry as a means of exponentially upgrading the seminal engine of Modern Ghana’s Economy, in the words of Colonial and Postcolonial Ghana’s Foremost Founding-Father and Most Erudite and Preeminent Statesman Par-Excellence, besides just dubiously facilitating the exponential production and export of raw cocoa beans.

For a 46-year-old man who, like former Vice-President Mahamudu Bawumia, has an Oxbridge stamp of academic and professional approval, and a University of Ghana (UG)-minted Doctorate in Economics and Finance or Fiscal Management, Dr. Forson tragically reflects the intellectual and the moral and the spiritual bankruptcy of the generation of Ghanaians born and brought up in the “Lost Generation” period of the Rawlings-commandeered eras of the extortionate juntas of the Armed Forces Revolutionary Council (AFRC) and the Provisional National Defense Council (PNDC), as well as the very first decade of the Rawlings-controlled faux democratic tenure of the National Democratic Congress.

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

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