JOSPONG Faux-Pas Is More Complicated Than It Seems

It is the sort of blunder or contretemps that has no easy and/or simple explanation, except the sort of human factor that often threatens the theoretically objective administration of justice. In the Akufo-Addo/Siaw-Agyapong Case, we have a clash between the personal and the official, friendship and the cold reality of the law. It was in the extremely difficult attempt to negotiate this treacherous terrain and context that President Addo DankwaAkufo-Addo was ineluctably caught off-guard (See “Emile Short Claims Osafo-Maafo Did Damage Control for Akufo-Addo” MyJoyOnline.com/Modernghana.com 12/5/17).

It is extremely difficult because, if, indeed, the operatives or principals of the JOSPONG Group of Companies inflated contractual expenditures, especially in the area of sanitation, and defrauded the Ghanaian taxpayer, as has been widely alleged, this racket was definitely accomplished with the full complicity of the Mahama cabinet appointees – very likely the extant ministers of Health, the Environment and, perhaps, even Local Government and Finance – who signed off on such contractual terms of reference. If the crimes being investigated and/or alleged to have been committed are proven to have teeth or criminal culpability can be established against the accused, then, of course, what this clearly means is that the sector ministers who signed off on the JOSPONG contracts did not conduct the legally required due diligence to ensure that the Ghanaian taxpayer was not shortchanged, or got a reasonable value for the services promised and/or delivered.

This in no way absolves JOSPONG from criminal culpability. What it clearly does is to simply widen the net to capture both appointees of the Mahama-led regime of the National Democratic Congress (NDC) and the JOSPONG principals. There was enough evidence indicating that the operatives of the JOSPONG Group of companies were less than kosher in their managerial culture, though the most egregious case in point, we are told, occurred in Liberia, where a World Bank-underwritten sanitation project entrusted to JOSPONG was allegedly so flagrantly botched that the World Bank’s authorities responsible for overseeing the successful execution of the project blacklisted and suspended JOSPONG from any contractual concessions or bids involving the global lender for a considerable number of years.

While it does not necessarily follow that the same underhanded contractual dealings may have occurred in Ghana, the home base of JOSPONG, nevertheless, there is good reason to believe that a similar fraudulent pattern may very well have been repeated here in Ghana. This, I hope and believe, is what the operatives of EOCO, the Economic and Organized Crime Office, are seeking to either confirm or disprove. Ultimately, I don’t think that the right way to go at it is for President Akufo-Addo to issue an official statement clarifying his JOSPONG faux-pas, as Justice Francis Emile Short, the seminal Chairman of the Commission on Human Rights and Administrative Justice (CHRAJ) is suggesting.

Rather, what the President needs to do is to say absolutely nothing about the JOSPONG contretemps and, instead, wait for the outcome of the EOCO investigation of the Siaw-Agyapong Group. And then let the law take its unfettered natural course. About the only statement that Nana Akufo-Addo may want and, in fact, may need to issue on JOSPONG, is to simply make it plain and clear that whatever he said to Mr. Siaw-Agyapong, by way of compliment and commiseration, during his working tour of the Greater-Accra Region, ought not to be taken by the general public to mean that he has any prejudice against the credibility and/or the integrity of the EOCO operatives.

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