Pelpuo Lacks the Moral Heft to Damn Akufo-Addo

As I vividly recall, Mr. Rashid Pelpuo, the main opposition National Democratic Congress’ Member of Parliament for Wa-Central Constituency, in the Upper-West Region, was out of the country, somewhere in the southern African region, on official assignment as Ghana’s substantive Sports Minister, when he was summarily removed from his post and promptly expelled from the cabinet of then-President John Evans Atta-Mills. He has yet to publicly disclose what led to his rather meteoric evisceration from the corruption- and scandal-wracked Atta-Mills government. And so it is rather amusing that Mr. Pelpuo would so imperiously and casually presume to instruct President Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo on how to conduct himself within the context of the ongoing criminal investigations involving the President of the Ghana Football Association (GFA) – (See “Stay Off Investigations Involving Nyantakyi – Pelpuo to Nana Addo” CitiNewsRoom.com / Ghanaweb.com 5/26/18).

The fact of the matter is that Mr. Pelpuo has absolutely no moral capital and/or credibility on which to predicate his cautionary note. We must also quickly observe that Mr. Pelpuo is one of the former Mahama cabinet appointees who have been fingered as having criminally drawn home double salaries while they served – for want of a better word – as MPs and Ministers of State. Indeed, were he a very smart politician, the Wa-Central MP would rather be studiously preparing to vigorously defend himself against his criminal scamming of the Ghanaian taxpayer. Needless to say, how the Commander-in-Chief of the Ghana Armed Forces conducts himself in regard to the Nyantakyi Affair ought to be the least among the worries of the sacked Sports Minister. In the final analysis, the determination of the details of the case and how it gets ultimately settled are strictly the purview of the key operatives of our national security agencies, in particular operatives of the Criminal Investigations Division (CID) of the Ghana Police Service (GPS).

Indeed, the Government would be better off being far less fixated on the seasonal exposés released by the Anas Aremeyaw Anas-led team of private investigators called Tiger-Eye PI. But by all means, it ought not to totally ignore the meaningful possibility of using some of these exposés to conduct its own enquiries into official corruption and misconduct in the country, especially since the Ghana Police Service and its several allied security agencies do not seem to be quite up to the game, as it were. The Government needs to be far less fixated on Tiger-Eye PI’s exposés because the latter investigative team appears to be more media- and entertainment-oriented than anything else. Which was why Mr. Anas did not seem to have had any qualms teaming up with a thoroughgoing corrupt politician like former President John Dramani Mahama in the largely failed exposure of official corruption among members of the country’s judiciary.

The preceding notwithstanding, what can scarcely be gainsaid and which Mr. Pelpuo rightly put his fingers upon, is the fact that most of the corruption accusations made against the Akufo-Addo Jubilee House have been wholly internally generated. Which, of course, is another oblique way of saying that the Akufo-Addo Administration is its own worst enemy. Most visible among the operatives of the ruling New Patriotic Party (NPP) who have publicly and virulently accused some key operatives of the Akufo-Addo Jubilee House of corruption are Mr. Kennedy Ohene Agyapong, the hip-shooting talkative NPP-MP for Assin-Central, in the Central Region, and the Hip-Life artist by the name of A-Plus or Mr. Kwame Asare Obeng, both of whom in the recent past have accused the two Deputy Chiefs-of-Staff at the Presidency, namely, Messrs. Francis Asenso-Boakye and Samuel Abu-Jinapor, of extortion and influence peddling. The accusations of the two men have, however, turned out to be primarily borne out of sheer greed and political opportunism. Which means that at very least, Messrs. Agyapong and Obeng may be just as greedy as those whom they have accused of wrongdoing.

What can hardly be disputed here is the fact that the Akufo-Addo Administration needs to take serious and effective control of its domestic or in-house affairs. And then the Government can more credibly be poised to handling issues of rank corruption and other political crimes swirling all over the country’s official circles.

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By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.
English Department, SUNY-Nassau
Garden City, New York
May 26, 2018
E-mail: [email protected]