The Criminal Past of President Mahama Comes Back to Haunt Him, Big Time! - Part 3

I often tell my wife of some 22 years now, Dolly Doris Afua Oye Mensah-Nyanyo, of Abutia-Kloe, in the Volta Region, and Akuapem-Abiriw, in the Eastern Region, that inasmuch as one cannot absolutely deny the stark history of unspeakable and wanton atrocities perpetrated against the Ghanaian people, especially Ghanaians of the country’s predominant Akan ethnicity, by the late Flight-Lieutenant Jeremiah “Jerry” John Rawlings-led junta governments of the so-called Provisional National Defense Council (PNDC), from December 31, 1981 to January 7, 1992, and before the latter the junta killing machine that was the short-lived Armed Forces Revolutionary Council (AFRC), June 4 to September 4, or thereabouts, 1979, so rankly and insufferably corrupt are the latter-day politicians who have followed smack in the footsteps of the Half-Akwamu and Ewe-raised Half-Scottish waif that, sometimes, Yours Truly cannot help it but desperately wish, in spite of himself, that there was another reprise of the “Iranistically” or the “Cubanistically” Bloody June 4 Revolution with us all over again.

At any rate, there are a plethora of issues to delve into right now than I have both the time and the temper for - but I promise that Divine Providence permitting or willing, we intend to take up each and every one of them in due course, in the offing - but for now, we intend to conclude our present three-part series on the long vigorously and relentlessly pursued INTERPOL tracking and the bounteously successful apprehension and the condign conviction of Mr. Kwaku Asante Berko, the man who criminally colluded and collaborated with then President John “Ouagadougou Ford Expedition Payola” Dramani Mahama in 2015, or not very long before, that is, in the latter instance of payola solicitation; and shortly thereafter, the Mahama-appointed custom-tailored Minister of Power, Dr. Kwabena Donkor, in what globally infamously became known as The AKSA Enerji Scandal to thoroughly fleece the Ghanaian people to the tune of millions of US dollars.

And the latter Mafiosi racket was rigged up under the specious and the spurious guise and pretext of finding a definitive or a lasting solution to the perennial problem of Dumsor, that is, the erratic and the woefully inadequate energy supply in the country (See “Former Goldman Sachs Investment Banker Convicted of Foreign Bribery and Money Laundering” Website of the US Attorney’s Office, Eastern District of New York 8/6/26). Of course this latest scandal comes smack on the back and in the wake of another Epic Scandal of seismically Trojan proportions a little over a decade ago, that became widely known as the European Airbus SE Payola Mega-Heist, in which the now-President John Dramani Mahama was then Ghana’s stealthily operating Vice-President and Second-in-Command to the “Mysteriously Vanished” President John Evans Atta-Mills. In Ghana, suave and stealthy operatives like “Moscow Mahama,” as the Gonja native from the Akufo-Addo-created Savannah Region has become known in some political circles in the country, as often called “Snakes-Under-Grass” or “Snakes-in-the-Grass,” depending on whether this phrase is pluralized or singularized.

Of course, the late President John Evans Atta-Mills was the former law professor of Ghana’s oldest and most selective flagship academy, at least until very recently, and he was the innocent-looking man who publicly and heartily celebrated the heinous and the treasonable fleecing of Ghanaian taxpayers by false pretenses by a key financier of the then newly elected National Democratic Congress, ironically, the most morally bankrupt and thoroughgoing corrupt major political party establishment in Ghana’s Fourth Republic, which also bills itself as the most politically accountable in the management of the economic resources of the country. That key party financier was Mr. Alfred Agbesi Woyome; and the Mega-Heist involved an estimated GH⊄51.2 Million, not factoring in Ghana’s skyrocketing inflationary rate over a period of at least a decade-and-half.

And here again, as in several other instances, it was the nationally renowned or infamous, depending on who is doing the critiquing, self-classd “Citizen Vigilante,” Mr. Martin ABK Amidu, unarguably the most servile of the fanatical lackeys of the late former President John Rawlings, and Ghana’s longest-serving Deputy Attorney-General and Deputy Minister of Justice and subsequently, the first Akufo-Addo-appointed Independent Special Prosecutor, as well as the man who flatly and adamantly refused to prosecute the then Candidate John Dramani Mahama, at the time a one-term former President of Ghana, on the clearly quite understandable but not in the least bit legally and/or morally acceptable grounds of Ethno-Ideological Bias on the part of the then President Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo-led equally rankly corrupt and thoroughgoing kleptocratic government of the present main opposition New Patriotic Party (NPP). who authoritatively informed Ghanaians that it was, indeed, the politically “Beatified” or Sanctified National Democratic Congress’ putative “King of Peace,” to wit, the then newly elected President John Evans Atta-Mills, who had set up the entire Woyome-fronted scheme for the primary benefit of a cash-strapped NDC front-row operatives.

What I really wanted to dispassionately underscore here is that short of a necessary but brief military intervention in the present chaotic state of affairs in Ghana in the offing, and here the spotlight is squarely one the complete absence of nonpartisan judicial justice - some old guard leaders of the ruling National Democratic Congress have even recently called for the reintroduction of the sort of death-squad tribunals that existed throughout the 1980s, under the extortionate and the sanguinary junta of the Rawlings-led erstwhile Provisional National Defense Council (PNDC) - very likely the Kwabena Donkor and the Mahama-rigged AKSA Mega-Heist, based on whose forensically unimpeachable evidence Ex-Goldman Sachs Executive-Director Mr. Asante Kwaku Berko was recently convicted on foolproof charges of bribery and money laundering is, based on the long-established and long-standing political culture and climate in Ghana, not apt to move a needle, as the common idiomatic expression goes hereabouts, in mainstream American speak or parlance, as it were.

As the late President Rawlings used to say in the heydays of the AFRC and PNDC junta rule, “If the boiling waters of our housecleaninggated revolution simmer down and go ice-cold, we will be obliged to heat it up again, trust me.” In short, our globally celebrated and recognized culture and relatively elaborate moral and philosophical temperament and all, we need to be soberly mindful of the fact that as a people, we have been leadenly saddled with 500 years of psychically and spiritually suicidal and malignant cancer of Wholesale and Corporate Self-Merchandising that is practically not apt to be therapeutically negotiated or surmounted with any remarkable results in the offing, least of all, with a grossly misguided “Reparatory Justice” that is apt to make the decadent state of our political culture and mindset even worse. Definitely not in the rest of the lifetime of the present generation of both Ghanaian and the rest of Indigenous Continental African Leadership. And I am not the first nor the second among our people to recognize this most painful fact of the miserable reality of our practical existence.

Now, in the tragicomic AKSA Conundrum, we had unspeakably unconscionable and nation-wrecking Gonja Mafiosi and some of their Non-Gonja Allies among the vanguard ranks of the National Democratic Congress characteristically scandalously scapegoating Dr. Kwabena Donkor and dubiously claiming to have had absolutely nothing to do with the bogus contractual equivalent of the Akufo-Addo-conjured National Cathedral Boondoggle of the Kyebi and the Akyem-Abomosu Apostolate. But now, contrary to the whole-cloth’s mendacity put into the media pipeline by “His Royal Excellency” Kwame Gonja, it has come to light that, indeed, what we always suspected of the shameless shenanigans of our globally infamous Savannah Accelerated Development Authority (SADA) Gravy-Train Operator and the latter’s Money-Bag Lockstep Conductor, to wit, Mr. John Abu Jinapor, was unarguably the unvarnished version of the reality on the ground, as it were.

Now, it is an open secret studiously witnessed by the most critical observers of Ghana’s Fourth Republican Political Culture that the inescapably suspicious transfer of Mr. John Abu Jinapor, as the then Deputy Minister of Petroleum, under the tutelage of substantive Petroleum Minister Mr. Armah Kofi Buah, to immediately become Ministerial-Second-Bananas to Dr. Kwabena Donkor, was to ensure, first and foremost that each and every pesewa of payola largesse-laden contractual compact brokered by a politically giddy Dr. Donkor would be evenly split between the Power Minister and Mr. Jinapor, the Gonja-Mafia Representative on behalf of the Mahama Presidency.

Now, from the New York City Trial of Mr. Kwaku Asante Berko, we also learn that at least for every $1 Million (USD) “palm-greaser” in an envelope passed onto the recently convicted Mr. Berko, at least several other envelopes containing at $250,000 (USD), that is, a Quarter-Million Dollars, were also passed on to other high-level subalterns of Dr. Kwabena Donkor in a long chain of a “pecking order” that extended all the way from the Mahama Presidency to Ghana’s Parliament, where even the relatively diddly payola sum of $5,000 (USD) was snapped up by these “Honorables” as a means of securing their approval for the AKSA Mega-Heist which, by the way, would also later be extended to the relevant operatives of the incoming Akufo-Addo Government, including Mr. Boakye Agyarko, the Akufo-Addo-named and subsequently fired Energy Minister and, possibly, the Divine Archbishop of Akyem-Abomosu himself!

We also know from the Pokuase Double-Talking Gospel of Mr. John Jinaoor that an outgoing President Mahama had, after all, not definitively resolved the chronic canker of Dumsor, as he had hoodwinked Ghanaian voters into believing in the runup to the December 2016 General Election. For those of our dedicated readers who may have so soon and suddenly forgotten the same, Mr. Jinapor made this obviously unintended revelation during the staggered power outages in the Pokuase area of Northeastern Accra, following the decision by the newly elected Akufo-Addo Government to replace some outmoded and decrepit electricity generating transformers between early 2017 and later that same year.

Ultimately, the imperative need for the immediate establishment of an Independent Panel of Judicial Investigators to enquire into precisely who got what cut of payola in the Asante Berko-Kwabena Donkor Scam cannot be gainsaid, if Team Mahama is to forensically vindicate itself vis-a-vis the fact of whether or not our Sovereign Democratic Republic of Ghana has been effectively converted into a Kleptocratic Republic of Chimpanzees. Or is it a Republic of Monkeys and Baboons? God Save Our Homeland Ghana! Apio!

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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