Abum-Sarkodie’s Removal Should Be Seriously Reconsidered by President Akufo-Addo

I have already written about the apparently vindictive removal of Mr. Peter Abum-Sarkodie, the former Executive Director of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), by some workers who claimed that the former lecturer of the Asante-Mampong Campus of the University of Education, Winneba, had misappropriated EPA funding and was not about to write another column on the same subject. But I have come across another credible news item which convinces me that, indeed, Mr. Peter Abum-Sarkodie has been given a raw deal (See “Ex EPA Boss, Others Spent GHȻ 62k on Foreign Trip, Not $81k – Document” Kasapafmonline.com / Ghanaweb.com 4/17/18).

What first raised my hackles, as it were, was the allegation by the agitators that they had information indicating that the Finland university with which the EPA was to sign an agreement verging on Ghana’s environmental protection, had already bought and paid for the roundtrip tickets of the three EPA staff members, including the former Executive Director, to travel to Finland to initial the compact. You see, I have always been skeptical of this pathological Santa Claus mentality of the average Ghanaian working-class agitator vis-à-vis the West. Unless Nana Asante-Bediatuo, the Executive-Secretary of the President, who signed the memorandum dismissing Mr. Abum-Sarkodie, has any other evidence clearly indicating that, indeed, the former EPA’s Executive Director has been in professional and, perhaps, even criminal breach of protocol, I absolutely see no reason why the right and most appropriate thing cannot be promptly done.

In other words, what we clearly have here is the amateurish and vindictive use of “hearsay” information to summarily railroad Mr. Abum-Sarkodie and his two other associates, namely, Mr. Ransford Sekyi and Ms. Angelina Tutua Mensah. According to the Kasapafmonline.com news report, on which this column is based, the allegation that Mr. Abum-Sarkodie and his two associates had frittered a whopping $81,000 (USD) on their 3-week trip to Finland is a whole cloth of fabrication. The actual figure that the Kasapafmonline.com reporter claims to have sighted at the EPA’s headquarters was GHȻ 62,809.64, which rounds up to GHȻ 63,000. Now, in real USD terms, what this means is that the 3-week trip that Mr. Abum-Sarkodie and his two associates took to Findland cost the EPA and, by extension, the Ghanaian taxpayer, a diddly $14,000 and not $81,000.

If the preceding elementary breakdown of spending has validity, then, clearly the EPA’s former Executive Director was removed from office for reasons definitely other than fiscal profligacy or impropriety. We await to see that the right and proper thing is done by the relevant movers-and-shakers of Jubilee House.

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By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.
English Department, SUNY-Nassau
Garden City, New York
April 17, 2018
E-mail: [email protected]