When Woyome Backers Speak of Trust

In the leadup to the 2012 Presidential Election, then Interim-President as well Presidential Candidate of the then ruling National Democratic Congress (NDC), Mr. John Dramani Mahama, looked Ghanaian voters straight in the eye and promised to retrieve the GHȻ 51.2 Million criminally taken from our National Treasury by Mr. Alfred Agbesi Woyome, with the criminal complicity of a remarkable number of the topmost leaders of the NDC, including then President John Evans Atta-Mills, late – Mr. Mahama was the Vice-President then. Well, four-and-half years later, Mr. Woyome would still be comfortably holding on to his mega-loot. Four-and-half years later, Ghanaians would be told that, in fact, throughout his tenure, at least a full-half of the Mahama cabinet appointees and other executive operatives were illegally and criminally taking home twice the office amount of their monthly salaries and paychecks.

So, it is rather amusing to hear National Democratic Congress’ operatives like Mr. Haruna Iddrisu, the Minority Leader in Parliament, and Mr. Samuel Okudzeto-Ablakwa, the party’s ranking member on the Parliamentary Foreign Affairs Committee and Minority Spokesperson on Foreign Affairs and Foreign Policy, claim to be avidly interested in how the American taxpayer’s money got spent through the Obama-initiated Millennium Challenge Account, at least Compact II of the MCA, to facilitate the efficient supply of energy resources in the country. Dear Reader, take a reading of the following quote from the NDC’s Parliamentary Minority, in the wake of revelations that there may have occurred some “material breaches” in the Millennium Development Authority-sponsored contractual compact struck between the Electricity Company of Ghana (ECG) and the Power Distribution Services (PDS) Company, Ghana Limited:

“We are additionally fortified by the knowledge that the United States’ Authorities would not adopt a nonchalant attitude and allow millions of US taxpayer dollars under the signed Compact II of the Millennium Challenge Account to be recklessly misapplied and squandered.”

Well, for the information of Messrs. Iddrisu and Ablakwa, I am one of the bona fide US taxpayers; and I can tell both my Ghanaian readers and the rest of the global community that the leaders of Ghana’s main opposition political party, the National Democratic Congress, are the least fiscally responsible politicians in Ghana’s postcolonial history. They are also the most corrupt and pontifically self-righteous of their ilk. Indeed, the NDC’s political-machine operatives may have so soon forgotten this – for Ghanaians, in general, are notorious for their short memory capacities, but even more so are the mnemonic capacities of their politicians – that scarcely three years ago, Ms. Hanna Tetteh, the half-Hungarian Mahama-appointed Ghana’s Foreign Minister, was loudly and rudely engaged in a fierce duel with the immediate former US Ambassador to Ghana, Mr. Robert Jackson, over what the much-rumored Mahama romantic flame then raucously and intemperately claimed to be the undue interference of the “snooty bastard Americans” in the internal affairs of the Sovereign Democratic Republic of Ghana.

I also vividly remember that a pathologically jejune and callow Mr. Okudzeto-Ablakwa was neck-deep involved in this verbal slugfest. I remember this vividly because I had to remind the wet-eared cantankerous social climber that a sizable chunk of the budget of the Mahama regime came from US foreign aid. Back then, too, the diplomatic to-do involved some fiscal Santa-Clausian gimmickry that Ms. Tetteh’s boss and alleged beau had rather tackily attempted to pull over the eyes of the unsuspecting Ghanaian voter. In the main, it had to do with then President Mahama’s order for his cabinet appointees to “voluntarily” donate at least 10-perecnt of their base salaries into a common set-aside fund, to be used in the “altruistic” construction of some Community Health Posts (CHPs) around the country. The Americans would shortly be vindicated, when it came to light that, indeed, the overwhelming majority of the Mahama cabinet appointees had not paid a dime into the so-called set-aside fund.

Now that the proverbial shoes are on the feet of their political opponents, the Haruna Iddrisu Gang would actually have the Americans not only interfere in the internal affairs of the Independent Sovereign Democratic Republic of Ghana, they would also eagerly have the Americans peremptorily “trigger investigations [into the ECG-PDS Scandal] under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act of the United States of America[,] especially after a clearer picture is now emerging [has now emerged?] that the Akufo-Addo Government stands complicit with top functionaries and cronies neck-deep in the putrescent sleaze.”

Sleaze, indeed! You see, sleaze is when Mr. John Dramani Mahama spends millions of cedis in taxpayer money to purportedly purchase hundreds of guinea fowls for the launching of a massive “Poultry-Farming Revolution” in Northern Ghana, and then shamelessly turn round to tell the Ghanaian taxpayer whose hard-earned income had been so criminally and recklessly spent, that the aforementioned guinea fowls have gone on a sight-seeing “expedition” to the Burkinabe capital of Ouagadougou.

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

By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., PhD
English Department, SUNY-Nassau
Garden City, New York
August 16, 2019
E-mail: [email protected]