On the Run: Martin Amidu’s S-O-S to Akufo-Addo Must Be Given Top Priority

Ghana’s Special Prosecutor’s take on the mindset of the just-appointed Acting Attorney-General and Secretary of the Justice Department, Mr. Matthew Whitaker, makes interesting reading, if also because the author makes absolutely no attempt to muff up whatever professional tiffs and/or disagreements he may be having with Ghana’s current Attorney-General and Minister of Justice, Ms. Gloria Akuffo (See “Martin Amidu Writes: The Whitaker Scenario – Stifling Independent Investigative Agencies of Funds” Modernghana.com 11/9/18).

In effect, the unmistakable implication here is that while, indeed, Ghana’s President Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo may be keen about reducing the unacceptably high level of official rot and corruption in the country to the barest minimum, some of Nana Akufo-Addo’s key cabinet appointees may very well be at cross-purposes with the President’s anti-corruption agenda. The Independent Special Public Prosecutor notes that he scarcely has enough office space to hire the requisite personnel in order to make his work effective, more than one year into his appointment.

Ghana’s Special Prosecutor also couples the preceding predicament with the fact of his office working on a shoestring budget, which effectively renders his work at best counterproductive. Mr. Amidu must know what he is talking about because he spent most of his adult career as a government’s lawyer and Ghana’s longest-serving Deputy Attorney-General and Deputy Minister of Justice and briefly as substantive Attorney-General and Minister of Justice, and was summarily expelled from the cabinet of the late President John Evans Atta-Mills for vigorously and publicly challenging the latter in the infamous matter of the Woyome Heist. In sum, Mr. Amidu has had the thankless privilege of working for the most corrupt one-man-led junta and democratically elected strongman, namely, Chairman and later President Jerry John Rawlings’ so-called Provisional National Defense Council (PNDC) and later the National Democratic Congress (NDC).

What the foregoing means is that Mr. Amidu clearly appears to be passionate about helping President Akufo-Addo’s publicly declared battle against official corruption succeed. But even more significantly, the Independent Special Public Prosecutor is fully mindful of the impact that a failed corruption battle would have on his hard-earned image and reputation as “The Citizen Vigilante,” one doggedly poised to ensuring that no villains and scoundrels who have criminally appropriated the Ghanaian taxpayer’s money easily gets away with the same. Now, where the newly recess-appointed Acting US’ Attorney-General comes in regards the clearly invidious and partisan comment that Mr. Whitaker, a retributive Jeff Sessions appointee, on the part of President Donald John Trump, of course, once made as a state official in Iowa, in the American Mid-West, to the effect that President Trump would do himself great good to effectively sabotage Mr. Robert Mueller’s ongoing investigations into possible Russian-government interference with the 2016 US Presidential election, by drastically reducing the budgetary resources allocated to the Office of the Independent Prosecutor and former Director of the US’ Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI).

Mr. Amidu’s comparison, while relevant and even quite fascinating, is, nevertheless, rather superficial because it cavalierly and grievously overlooks the power and heft of the now Democratic Party-controlled lower house of the United States’ Congress or the House of Representatives. In the wake of the November 6, 2018 mid-term elections in which the Democrats carried the House by some 25 or 30 seats, the latter party’s leaders wasted absolutely no time, whatsoever, to let it be known to the White House, the seat of the US Presidency, that they would not take kindly to any mischievous attempt by President Trump or any of his cabinet appointees, and even Republican Congressional Representatives who, while they held the majority of seats in the lower house on Capitol Hill, suavely colluded with the White House to hamstring the Mueller investigation, to hobble the latter.

The problem in the case of Ghana is that our very young democracy woefully lacks a House of Representatives or a Parliament composed of progressive-minded men and women with formidable political spine and the best interest of the country at heart. Under such morally and culturally dispiriting circumstances, President Akufo-Addo has no other alternative but to promptly step up to the plate – in American baseball parlance – and ensure that the Independent Special Prosecutor is adequately equipped with the necessary tools and cutting-edge technology to enable him and his staff to bring all official fraudsters, robber-barons and scam-artists, irrespective of political party affiliation and/or ideological suasion, promptly to book.

*Visit my blog at: kwameokoampaahoofe.wordpress.com Ghanaffairs

By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., PhD

English Department, SUNY-Nassau

Garden City, New York
November 10, 2018
E-mail: [email protected]