The Criminal Past of President Mahama Comes Back to Haunt Him, Big Time!

The banner news headline story was captioned as follows: “Defendant Asante Kwaku Berko Paid More than $1 Million Bribes Related to the Development of a Power Plant in Ghana.” It was originally published on the website of the US Department of Justice (DoJ) Attorney’s Office of the Eastern District of New York, which is located in the Borough of Brooklyn, one of the Five Boroughs that constitute the New York Metropolis of some 10 million people. A little higher up the preceding headline was another even more prominent and bolder and thematically broader headline captioned “Former Goldman Sachs Investment Banker Convicted of Foreign Bribery and Money Laundering.”

Those of our readers who have been studiously following events surrounding the rankly and unspeakably corrupt culture of the leaderships of Ghana’s two major political parties, in the country’s Fourth Republican Dispensation, officially kick-started in January 1992, or thereabouts, would have had absolutely no difficulty, whatsoever, recognizing the name of Mr. Asante Kwaku Berko, who was immediately identified by at least one major Ghanaian media portal by his previous employment by the presently ruling National Democratic Congress (NDC), headed by the twice nonconsecutively elected President John “European Airbus SE Payola” Dramani Mahama, a thoroughgoing corrupt and morally degenerate, Russian-trained Communications Propagandist and career politician who literally cannibalized some ballot boxes to enable the putative political scumbag bully his way to his second term at the Presidency in the December 7, 2024 Ghanaian General Election.

And by the way, the preceding scandalous spectacle was shown on television and via YouTube all over the world. At any rate, the banner news headline that appeared on the Modern Ghana Media Portal was as follows: “Former TOR Boss Asante Berko Convicted in Us Over Ghana Power Plant Bribery Scheme” (8/7/26). But the story only squarely focused on the criminal justice aspect or perspective of the United States’ Department of Justice, as already adumbrated, although it was really about the globally infamous shoot-from-the-hip profligate and out-of-the-blue, mushroom establishment of a ministerial cabinet called the Ministry of Power by a politically desperate President Mahama in the runup to the 2016 Ghanaian General Election. I bet the man who once described the overwhelming majority of the country’s electorate as having been cursed with the memory banks of chickens - or Nkokonketenkete, as he avidly prefers to label it.

Anyway, the Ministry of Power or the Power Ministry was specially created, characteristically by the way of a boondoggle, for Dr. Kwabena Donkor, a conjugal in-law on President Mahama’s wife, Lordina Mahama’s side of the family. At the time in question, the British-trained Business Management Specialist, at least that was what Dr. Donkor publicly claims, preferred to style himself as a “Crackerjack Expert” in the definitive resolution of precisely the kind of energy supply problem that the country was facing. He was a member of Ghana’s Parliament on the ticket of the then as now, the Mahama-chaperoned ruling National Democratic Congress.

Well, the Power Ministry was a veritable boondoggle because Dr. Donkor, curiously but not in the least bit surprisingly, in flagrant departure from protocol, had abruptly taken to the august Floor of Ghana’s National Assembly or Parliament, and earnestly and pontifically vouched, boastfully, that he would be able to definitively resolve Ghana’s chronic and perennial problem with the woefully inadequate supply of electricity or energy, as it is commonly known thereabouts. The then Member of Parliament bereft of any ministerial portfolio would extemporaneously vouch that rectifying the acute shortage of energy supply was specifically what he had been trained for at the highest level of technological know-how in the United Kingdom.

Absolutely no comprehensive proposal would be submitted to Mr. Mahama who, in his lunatic desperation to win the 2016 Ghana’s Presidential Election and thus prolong his stay at Ghana’s Jubilee House or the Ghanaian equivalent of the White House, had paid an extremely rare visit to Parliament House, where he once served for quite a remarkable number of years, to sell this most politically excruciating need of his. A headache or a migraine, I guess the Dear Reader could aptly say.

In retrospect, it appears to have been in the wake of this hopelessly desperate search for a visionless and an abysmally cheap solution to Ghana’s power crisis then, and still now, globally known as “Dumsor,” that the abracadabra name of Mr. Asante Kwaku Berko came to the fore as a formidably influential pointman and a fellow Ghanaian countryman who could be most relied upon to secure the necessary funding to facilitate the definitive resolution of Dumsor and with the latter, a smooth passageway for a megalomaniacal President Mahama to prolong his gravy fiesta at the John “The Gentle Giant” Agyekum-Kufuor-constructed and the Indian Government financed Jubilee House.

At the time in discussion, that is, between 2014 and 2016, Mr. Berko, who is now a criminal convict in the custody of officials of the United States’ Department of Justice, had apparently recently departed from the corruption-disabled government of Mr. Mahama’s National Democratic Congress, where the now 52-year-old Mr. Asante Berko had once been appointed as a non-cabinet Executive-Director of the President Kwame Nkrumah-established Tema (Ghana) Oil Refinery (TOR) Company, the very first of its kind in the ECOWAS Subregion. The late former President Nkrumah is, of course, Ghana’s first postcolonial leader, having had his university-level education in the United States of America, first, at the predominantly African American Lincoln University, in Lower Oxford County, Pennsylvania, and the Benjamin Franklin-founded and predominantly white and Ivy-prestigious University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

But what is most significant to note or highlight here is the fact that there is absolutely nothing readily verifiable and accessible, by way of credible performance record, indicating that, indeed, Mr. Asante Berko had either extraordinarily distinguished himself or acquitted himself creditably as an Executive-Director of the Tema Oil Refinery or TOR. Nonetheless, it is none the least bit flabbergasting that the recently convicted middle-age man, whom we also learn had absconded to the United Kingdom (UK) and was an FBI-Wanted Person, who had to be extradited from the British Isles by an INTERPOL collaborative effort to the United States, would also be dubiously invited by the Mahama regime to help with “clueless” efforts aimed at the purportedly definitive resolution of Dumsor, in view of what Ghanaians know about the erstwhile custom-tailored and the Kwabena Donkor-gifted boondoggle of a Power Ministry.

You see, Dear Reader, I had originally intended to caption this brief analytical series on the Mahama-Kwabena Donkor Affair, or the Kwabena Donkor-John Jinapor Scandal far more poetically as “Kwame Gonja and the Kingdom of Chimpanzees,” until my wife almost knocked me down and out cold. “Come on, do you suppose you’re still a teenager?!” Anyway, now, though, it well appears that, finally, like the globally infamous Alfred Agbesi Woyome Mega-Heist or L’Affair Woyome, with the arrest and the resonant and the condign prosecution of Mr. Asante Kwaku Berko right here in the Trumpian Revolutionary Republic of Make America Great Again, or the MAGA Republic - talk of inscrutable corruption - finally, the proverbial cat is out of the bag. Whoops!!

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