The Criminal Past of President Mahama Comes Back to Haunt Him, Big Time! - Part 2

Yes, the metaphorical cat is, finally, smack out of the stinky, raw and dried fermented cocoa-bean sack, as those of us who grew up on cocoa farms in the forest regions of the southern half of Ghana are wont to say. And the Dear Reader can bet their proverbial bottom-dollar that it is not a pretty sight at all. As of this writing and media preparation, the aforereferenced press release (See Part 1 of this brief three-part article) on the website of the US Attorney’s Office of the Eastern District of New York, Brooklyn (8/6/26), had noted categorically that the bribery and the money laundry scheme criminally rigged up by Asante Kwaku Berko and his Turkish Partners of the “AKSA Enerji Uretim A. S.[,] a Turkish energy company and [a] Goldman [Sachs] client, for the construction and financing of a power plant in Ghana amidst a national energy crisis in the country,” also had the “conspirators [discussing the flagrantly and treasonously criminal matter of] paying $1 million [USD] to the Ghanaian Minister of Power” (See “Former Goldman Sachs Investment Banker Convicted of Foreign Bribery and Money Laundering”; as well, “Defendant Asante Kwaku Berko Paid More than $1 Million in Bribes Related to the Development of a Power Plant in Ghana”).

Now, the smoking-gun figure of $1 Million (USD) that appears in the preceding subtitle of the media release on the website of the United States’ Attorney’s Office in the Eastern District of New York may be conspicuously and curiously deemed to be charitably understated, because the real unstated amount involved in the aforementioned payola and the money-laundering scheme ranged in the order of tens and hundreds of millions of dollars, with Ghana’s extant Minister of Power, to Dr. Kwabena Donkor, the National Democratic Congress’ former Member of Parliament for the Pru-East Constituency, in the Akufo-Addo-created Bono-East Region, being handsomely, even if egregiously and criminally, paid at least $1 Million (USD) in kickbacks.

Which is also to reliably observe that this is not just a lame hearsay allegation lacking forensic credibility; for as of this writing, Yours Truly had fleetingly albeit authoritatively chanced across another news story in which it was reported that the prime criminal convict, namely, Mr. Asante Kwaku Berko, had been sentenced to 10 years’ imprisonment for his contractual anchor’s role in this heinously treasonable International Mega-Racket. It had earlier on been speculated that Kwaku Asante Berko - the natural or customary order in which his name would be ordinarily arranged among the Akan people of Ghana - or K A Berko, stood the dire risk of being sentenced to at least 30 years’ imprisonment.

So, it be readily surmised that the prime criminal culprit had been able to very likely secure the services of some crackerjack or first-rate team of lawyers and, possibly, been able to plea-bargained his way out of a statutorily mandated lifetime prison sentence, which would normally have ranged anywhere between 25 years and up. But don’t quote me on the finality of the preceding until all the details of the Berko Trial have been released by the prosecutors and the court. Nevertheless, what caught this writer’s sedulous attention, more than anything else, was what Mr. Andrew Tysen Duva, the United States’ Assistant Attorney-General of the US’ Department of Justice (DoJ), had to say in the aforereferenced media release and, also, had his statement had, in terms of the long-term and the far-reaching implications that such statement of judicial and legal intent may have for Ghana’s unabashedly payola-prone “Official Number One,” to wit, President John “Brazil Embraer Caper” Dramani Mahama, and his National Democratic Congress’ Abongo Boys and Girls, or Certified Robber-Barons, by way of any disciplinary or punitive fallout from the Asante Berko-Kwabena Donkor Multimillion Mega-Heist.

On the foregoing score, this was what Assistant A-G Andrew Duva had to say, by way of a clarion or a signal warning to all payola-prone and robber-baron regimes like the Mahama-led ragtag government of Ghana’s National Democratic Congress, a government that, as was widely and globally witnessed via television, radio broadcasts, YouTube and a host of other cybermedia reports, literally cannibalized legitimately cast ballots in Ghana’s December 7, 2024 General Election, as the latter political party’s only surefire means of ever wielding the democratic reins of power and governance in the offing: “We live in a global economy that American companies must be able to compete in fairly,”

Mr. Duva gravely and solemnly intoned and continued: “This defendant [ i.e. Asante Kwaku Berko] corrupted that fair competition. He abused his position at a world-renowned American investment bank by helping bribe Ghanaian officials, so he and his co-conspirators, including senior executives at a Turkish company could make money [on the cheap]. Today’s conviction makes clear that criminals who undermine our country’s interests by corrupting foreign governments and cutting off fair competition will face the full force of the Department of Justice.”

Of course, I also thought about the, in retrospect, the strikingly and the fetchingly prophetic prediction by one of the Ahwoi Brothers - either Ato Ahwoi or Kwamena Ahwoi - that the thoroughly rigged and ballot-cannibalized 2024 General Election that vaulted Mr. John “God In His Inscrutable Power” Dramani Mahama onto the highest and the most powerful seat of the land, properly speaking, was only a dress rehearsal that was inescapably intended to get the officially alleged winner out of the way in order to facilitate the legitimate democratic elevation of then Vice-President-Elect, Naana Jane Opoku-Agyemang to the Kofi Antubam-sculpted Presidential Chair. This is a prophecy whose time has clearly come. If an increasingly megalomaniacal Kwame Gonja refuses to exit the John “The Gentle Giant” Agyekum-Kufuor-constructed Jubilee House with the long overdue humility and dignity, by all means, let those of the Umbrella Party imbued with “Virgin” Revolutionary Spirit of Flt-Lt. Jeremiah “Jerry” John Rawlings quietly show the exit to the criminally determined Bole-Bamboi native from the Akufo-Addo-created Savannah Region and go back to his Pre-Atta-Mills “Chicken Farming.”

Well, the truth and the practical reality on the ground, in Shakespearean speak, as it were, is composed of much sterner stuff than the crisply quoted warning and poignant observation by the US’ Assistant Attorney-General Andrew Tysen Duva would have the rest of the world believe. And it is the glaringly unarguable fact that absolutely in no way could Mr. Asante Kwaku Berko be truthfully accused of having corrupted the globally infamous corruption- and payola-addicted faux-democratic regime of the John Dramani Mahama-led government of Ghana’s National Democratic Congress. At the very worst, Mr. Berko could only be aptly accused of being too greedy and contractually unconscionable to so facilely step into a kleptocratically barbarous market of entrenched political scam-artists and pathological nation-wreckers to do what conscientious and socially responsible leaders of the putative Civilized World would be extremely hesitant to do.

In the recent past, for instance, Americans leaders of both two major traditional political parties have not been hesitant to engage in contractually lopsided business deals with leaders of the so-called Third-World Countries that virtually bled their contractually naive, klutzy and obtusely self-serving leaders, for the most part, to virtual socioeconomic extinction. A striking example or textbook case in point was the globally infamous Kaiser Aluminum Company negotiated construction of Ghana’s Akosombo Dam, on the Volta River, in the late 1950s, under the ill-fated Kwame Nkrumah-led Progressive-Socialist Government of the tautological Convention People’s Party (CPP).

This is precisely why many of us studious observers of Ghana’s Fourth Republican Political Culture are deadset against the proposed extension of the constitutionally mandated consecutive and maximum presidential term from 8 to 10 years, in particular the patently undeserved opportunity that such an extension offers a bonanza for the criminal fleecing of the country’s fragile economy pathologically incorrigible political scam-artists like President John Dramani Mahama, per the unimpeachable testimony of the late former President Jerry John Rawlings Mr. Mahama’s long-term mentor and the universally acclaimed Founding-Father of the presently ruling National Democratic Congress.

What is, however, incontrovertibly accurate is Mr. Joseph Nocella, Jr’s assertion at the conviction and, presumably, the prison sentencing of Mr. Asante Kwaku Berko, who holds dual US and Ghanaian citizenship that: “Today’s verdict marks another significant victory in this office’s longstanding commitment to rooting out corruption,” adding sagaciously and poignantly, that: “The defendant abused his access to high level foreign government officials and his platform as an investment banker at a prestigious American firm to line his own pockets with millions of dollars.”

Now, what is also intriguing about this story is what may be aptly called THE TURKISH CONNECTION, a strategic and tactical phenomenon which has seen an unusual upsurge right here in the proverbial Big Apple of New York City and, most recently, slanderously used against former New York City Mayor Eric Adams, which clearly and unmistakably is almost invariably underlain by the sacrosanct commercial interests of the Almight and the Ubiquitous Pro-Israel and Neo-Zionist Lobby. It often strategically plays out under the guise of Mafia-type of criminality when, in actuality, it is an age-old commercial rivalry that is steeped in ethno-religious differential identities, in any case, what is most significant here has to do with the at once flagrant and patently criminal exposure of the vehement denials by Ghana’s Conja Mafia that, somehow, the Mahama and the National Democratic Congress-rigged Kwabena Donkor Mega-Heist and Mega-Scam was all about the officially shamed and scapegoated Mahama Conjugal In-Law.

And it is to this most scandalous aspect of the Asante Berko and the Kwabena Donkor Schematic Scam, as it were, that we return to conclude this brief series of discussions with next.

By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., PhD
Professor Emeritus, Department of English
SUNY-Nassau Community College
Garden City, New York
E-mail: okoampaahoofekwame@gmail.com

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