Ghana-Israel Row and the Pandora Papers: I Have a Completely Different Take Here

The Ghana-Israel diplomatic flap which resulted from the alleged deportation of some seven Ghanaian travelers at Israel’s Ben Gurion International Airport, near the latter country’s Administrative Capital of Tel-Aviv, which also reportedly included some four Ghanaian Parliamentarians who had allegedly arrived in the globally storied “Holy Land,” to purportedly attend a Cyber-Security Conference, may very well involve more than Ghanaians have been informed by the media so far (See “Israel–Ghana Diplomatic Row: What Happened and the Apology” Modernghana.com 12/3/25).

A critical reading of the afore-referenced featured opinion piece, by Mr. Mustapha Bature Sallama, who describes himself as a private investigator and an intelligence analyst, which constitutes the basis of this brief critical analysis and commentary, also tangentially highlights the fact of a dispute or controversy over media reports entailing an official apology allegedly issued by the Tel-Aviv authorities whom, we are further informed, had also proposed that this apparent diplomatic faux-pas, or whatever it might have been deemed to be, be amicably and privately resolved.

According to Mr. Mustapha Bature Sallama, that is, the author of the opinion piece presently in discussion - Yours Truly, by the way, has come across the headlines of several news reports on this very subject but has not had ample time to devour and digest any of them - the Israeli authorities have publicly acknowledged the factual occurrence of the widely reported deportation story but have vehemently denied issuing any formal or official apology to their Ghanaian counterparts.

Now, it is equally interesting to also note that the author of the article referenced at the beginning of this discourse makes absolutely no painstaking or meaningful attempt to inform his readers, precisely why the Israeli authorities have, reportedly, flatly denied any wrongdoing, even while also allegedly acknowledging that, indeed, the incident, as widely reported by the media did, in fact, actually occur. There is clearly something amiss with either the media reportage of the incident itself or something onerous or diplomatically unseemly, very likely on the part of the Ghanaian authorities or diplomatic counterparts of the Israelis in Ghana’s capital of Accra.

As well, coming right on the heels of a widely alleged humongous raft and rash of petitions seeking the immediate removal of the Chairperson of Ghana’s Independent - or otherwise Independent - Electoral Commission, to wit, Mrs. Jean Adukwei Mensa, by what appears to a gang of deliberately recruited elements of Ghana’s presently ruling political party, the National Democratic Congress (NDC), an exemplary or a model replica of which Ghanaians recently witnessed with unspeakable horror and agitation, entailing the hitherto historically unprecedented interdiction and the summary removal of the third woman to have been appointed Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of Ghana (SCOG), one can logically and plausibly surmise that the alleged trip by the Ghanaian Parliamentarians purportedly scheduled to attend the so-called International Conference on Cyber Security in Tel-Aviv, may actually be integral to or part and parcel of the long-hinted politically motivated attempt and decision to summarily remove Mrs. Jean Adukwei Mensa, internationally acclaimed and reputed by election observers to be unarguably Ghana’s finest Chief Returning Officer in the country’s Fourth Republican Democratic Political Culture and History over the past generation and perhaps even more.

You see, following the controversial and much-maligned politically motivated and constitutionally schlocky removal of Chief Justice Gertrude Araba Esaaba Sackey-Torkornoo, a distinguished and lambent-witted legal luminary and first-rate jurist appointed to the Apex Court by the government of the recently exited President Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo, sponsored by the country’s presently main opposition New Patriotic Party (NPP), the Imperial and the Dynastic National Chairman of the presently ruling National Democratic Congress, namely, Mr. Johnson “The Mosquito-General” Asiedu-Nketia, was widely reported by the local Ghanaian media to have cynically, knavishly and smirkily informed the general Ghanaian public, in particular partisans and sympathizers of the National Democratic Congress, that the next surefire target for elimination and removal as a key appointee of the previous Akufo-Addo government would be Mrs. Jean Adukwei Mensa.

Now, this is precisely where the alleged Tel-Aviv-hosted International Cyber Security Confabulation emerges to the fore, as it were; and it has to do with the fact that it was the epoch-making and the status-quo shattering appointment of Mrs. Jean Adukwei Mensa, a remarkable legal maven and luminary in her own right, that, at least while it lasted, signaled the effective dismantling of the strategic equivalent of the Sphinx-like Monkey Wrench embedded into Ghana’s Biometric Electoral System by the key operatives of the National Democratic Congress, that was salutarily and salubriously and epically exposed to public scrutiny by the professionally inimitable and administratively unrivalled former Executive-Director of the Institute for Economic Affairs, the prestigious and the renowned think-tank located in Ghana’s capital of Accra.

It was Mrs. Mensa, the current Chairperson of Ghana’s Independent Electoral Commission (IEC), who both Sheroically and Heroically exposed the sinister shape and the reptilean form of the contractual compact neocolonially brokered between the Dr. Kwadwo Afari-Gyan-Chaired Ghana Electoral Commission (GEC) and an Israeli-based Cyber Security Company called STL (Google: The Pandora Papers), which for quite a considerable while hermetically controlled and literally monopolized the electoral and, in effect, the political destiny of our dubiously touted Sovereign Democratic “Shithole” Republic of Ghana.

In short, the Israeli authorities know something about the so-called Cyber Security Confabulation Affair that resulted in the recent widely reported diplomatic fisticuffs between Tel-Aviv and Accra that they are not letting on directly to their “real” and “true” friends back home in Ghana. It will not be very long, by the way, before, once again, the politically damning contents of the proverbial PANDORA’S BOX will be exposed and brought to light. In the meantime, let’s keep our fingers crossed with bated breaths. God Bless Our Homeland Ghana and Make Our Nation Bold and Strong Enough to Both Deserve an Apology from Our Brothers and Sisters in “The Holy Land,” and also Be Able to Staunchly and Fiercely Resist the Oppressors’ Rule.

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