When an Honest Man Returns GH¢70 Million, Why Has the Story Gone Quiet?

Ghanafuor, on 22 July this year a court ordered the Bank of Ghana to pay GH¢79,651,132.62 to a company called Servistar Minwax (WA) Limited, out of the Ghana Revenue Authority's Tax Refund Account. The money was a refund of import duties overpaid in 2009. Five days later, the man who controls that company went to the press and refused it.

His name is Henry Ekow Manly-Spain, and he is not a monk or a mystic. He is a businessman and a former vice president of the Ghana Boxing Authority. He said his own filed claim, with interest, came to a little over GH¢10 million. He said his conscience would not allow him to accept an amount far beyond the value of his original claim, and he called the alternative a betrayal of his conscience, his business and the nation. He asked government to inquire into how the figure had grown.

Read that again, slowly. In a country where the phrase "judgment debt" has become a synonym for organised plunder, a man was handed seventy million cedis he had not asked for and gave it back.

Now attend to what happened next, because this is where the story stops being about one man's virtue and becomes about ours.

On 1 August he petitioned the Commissioner-General of the GRA in writing, formally rejecting the payment and asking for an independent investigation by the GRA, the Economic and Organised Crime Office and other bodies. On 20 August the High Court granted the GRA's own request for a forensic reconciliation of the sum, permitting the appointment of an independent auditor to establish what is actually owed. On 15 September the Authority issued a statement under Commissioner-General Anthony Kwasi Sarpong confirming that it had filed a notice of appeal against the entirety of the ruling, applied to set aside the garnishee order absolute citing material discrepancies in the certified debt, been refused a stay in the High Court and would renew that application at the Court of Appeal when the legal year began, and that the Commissioner-General had ordered an internal audit of the entire reconciliation and litigation process. It also commended Mr Manly-Spain for his honesty, and rested part of its case on section 69 of the Revenue Administration Act, 2016, Act 915, which it says protects the refund account from attachment.

All of that is admirable, and all of it was two months ago.

Today, in the middle of November, I can find no published finding from the forensic reconciliation. No ruling from the Court of Appeal. No announcement that a criminal investigation has been opened. No confirmation that a single cedi was paid or released. The most consequential act of public honesty in Ghana this year has been absorbed, quietly, into an audit and an adjournment, and the country has moved on to the next outrage.

Before we go further, let me set the figures down properly, because there are three of them and mischief thrives on the confusion. The first is the duty overpaid, which the GRA puts at under one million cedis and dates to 2009, when the overpayment occurred. The second is the claim as filed by the company, which Mr Manly-Spain puts at GH¢8,951,543, rising to a little over GH¢10 million with accumulated interest. The third is the GH¢79,651,132.62 certified by the court and ordered to be paid.

Those are not three competing versions of one number. They are three different things: the tax overpaid, the claim filed, and the certified judgment sum. And the certified sum did not come out of thin air. An audit in 2016 confirmed the overpayment. The company applied for its refund and was not paid. It sued. And then, as the court recorded, judgment was entered for the plaintiff after the parties themselves reconciled the amount due, and the sum was certified after that reconciliation, which the GRA failed to pay.

What no one has published is the arithmetic that carried a reconciled and certified sum up to seventy-nine million. The Authority attributes the increase to a 35 per cent daily compound interest rate. I take that as its characterisation rather than a figure I can vouch for. Which is precisely the point: the independent auditor appointed on 20 August was given one job, to settle the number. Until his findings are public, anyone who tells you what the true figure is, in either direction, is guessing. That includes anyone telling you the businessman is a hero and anyone telling you he is a chancer.

I want to put a proposition to the editors of our legacy press, the ones who still employ people to make telephone calls and read documents rather than to rewrite what is already trending.

This case is the cheapest accountability investigation available to you. There is a court order with a number on it, an auditor appointed with the court's blessing, a public petition, a press release from the Authority itself admitting discrepancies, and a gap of three months. Every participant is on the record. Nobody needs a leaked tape. Somebody needs to ask the auditor what he has found, the GRA what its internal audit concluded, the Attorney-General's office whether any file has been opened, and the Court of Appeal registry when the stay application will be heard. Four calls, one story, and it is the story that decides whether this country's judgment debt problem is a matter of policy or of habit.

Because here is the part that should frighten us. If that increase came from a formula rather than from anyone's decision, then the inflation of this judgment did not require a single corrupt official. It required a formula, an in-tray, and nobody whose name attached to either.

That is what a system without a principal looks like. It does not need villains. It needs only that the paperwork be nobody's.

And it is why the second recommendation is not ceremonial.

I propose that Mr Manly-Spain be awarded the Companion grade of the Order of the Star of Ghana. Let me be exact about what that is, because our public conversation about honours is as careless as everything else. Our honours were instituted in 1960 to replace the British system: the Order of the Star of Ghana, the Order of the Volta, the Medal for Gallantry and the Grand Medal. The Star of Ghana was the highest until June 2008, when the Grand Order of the Star and Eagles was added above it, reserved exclusively for persons who have served as President of the Republic. That one cannot be conferred on a businessman, however honest, and I am not asking for it. What I am asking for is the highest thing this Republic can actually bestow on a citizen who has not been its President: the Star of Ghana in its Companion class, above Officer and Member.

Not as a reward for a good feeling, and not to embarrass him, but because a nation teaches its children what it rewards. We have conferred our honours on soldiers, on statesmen, on chiefs, on musicians, on vice presidents, and on men whose names we now argue about. It is time we conferred our highest available one on a businessman who declined an unearned seventy million cedis and asked for an investigation instead, because we want every Ghanaian who faces the same quiet choice at a counter, a customs post or a bank desk to know what this country thinks of that choice. Honour is not a decoration. It is a syllabus.

Ghanafuor, the deeper scandal is not that a court awarded a sum nobody can explain. It is that we did not demand the explanation. Mr Manly-Spain did his part in July, loudly and at cost to himself. The auditor has his part. The Authority has its part. Our press has its part, and it is the one part still unpaid.

If the responsible sections of our legacy media cannot find the state of play in a matter like this, with everything on the record and nothing to fear, then we should stop pretending that our silence is a shortage of information. It is a choice, and we make it every morning.

As one always says, when it comes to resetting a bankrupted national economy in earnest, clarity of thought matters paaa, oooo, Ghanafuor. Yooooooooooo. A word to the wise…