President John Agyekum Kufuor (JAK) yesterday invited Central Regional Minster Isaac Edumadze, a.k.a. “Hercules”, to the Castle over last Friday’s road-rage incident at Suhum in the Eastern Region.

Chronicle gathered that the President’s office took the bulky Regional Minister through lessons on behaviour over his role in the incident in which he ordered his driver to seize a taxi from Suhum to his residence at Cape Coast.

The taxi was driven off by the Minster’s driver on his orders after his personal bodyguard fired warning shots that sent the cab driver and the passengers scurrying for their dear lives in the nearby bushes.

Chronicle could immediately not establish what the fate of the herculean Edumadze, estimated to weigh about 250 pounds and built like a Japanese sumo-wrestler would be. But snippets of information gathered by the Chronicle, suggests that Edumadze may soon lose his ministerial appointment.

The Minister on Monday night also threatened the reporter of the story, Mr. Dominic Jale, for the report, warning that He accused the Chronicle of malice and said he would not be surprised if some journalists have been bribed to bring him down. “I fully believed that your story was written with mischievous motive,” he shouted on the long distance phone call from Cape Coast.

The Minister also questioned the rights of the Reporter to investigate the story, since as he put it, the Reporter was not a police officer or an official of the Bureau of National Investigation (BNI) and, therefore, has no right to investigate the story about him.

Later events also prove that “Hercules” Edumadze coerced the owner of the taxi to deny the Chronicle report and virtually provided the services of a fax machine at his office for the owner to file a retraction of the story. The fax, which was sent to the Chronicle’s office, unfortunately, betrayed him. The fax bore the phone/fax number of the Minister’s office.

The owner of the taxi, Ransford Akrofi a.k.a. “sika ye mogya” also stormed the Chronicle offices last Sunday to plead with the paper to drop the story on the directives of the Minister. His request was promptly turned down.

Chronicle investigations also indicate that immediately this week Monday edition of the paper, which reported on the Minister’s seizure of the taxi hit the streets, was analysed at Choice FM as part of its newspaper review programme, the Minister stormed the office of the Accra-based radio station with his bodyguard in tow.

Without any courtesy, he brushed aside staff and headed straight to the studios of the station to talk to the host of the morning’s newspaper review programme, Dr. Niiyi Alabi. Niiyi Alabi confirmed yesterday on “Agenda Talk“ a programme, which the Minister was billed to attend, that the Minister walked into the live-on-air programme without any courtesy with his bodyguard wielding an AK47 gun in line.

Meantime, a number of callers on “Agenda Talk” urged President Kufour to discipline Edumadze for his inability to conduct himself with decorum as a Minister of State. Most callers on the “Agenda Talk” programme viewed the Minister’s behaviour to be objectionable, noting that it could drag the name of the Kufuor administration in the mud and render the government unpopular.

The callers argued that, the Minister should have reported the incident to the police and not take the law into his own hands as he did. The Minister, who was supposed to appear on the Choice FM programme with Chronicle’s News Editor Alfred Ogbamey to discuss the story could not make it.

He later sent word that the President had called him to an emergency meeting. Speaking on the programme, Ogbamey said the story purported to sound a wake-up call to ministers who by virtue of their position abuse their office by taking the law into their own hands without passing through the correct channels of solving them. “It is to ensure that certain ministers of state realise that the very media that took the last government on for some of the worst examples they set, is the same media that would take them on when they also start setting bad examples”, he stressed.

“The ministers have the duty and responsibility to set better examples,” he stated. The Chronicle News Editor advised that the ministers should not think that the media would turn a blind eye on misconducts on their part and repeat the excesses Ghanaians witnessed under the NDC government, because it is the responsibility of Ghanaians to ensure good governance by holding the government accountable for its activities.

Minister Edumadze had earlier in an interview granted to Choice FM told a different story from what he told the Chronicle.

Edumadze admitted in the Choice interview that his bodyguard gave two warning shots. This contradicts his interview with the Chronicle in which he denied that his bodyguard fired the shots that resulted in the taxi driver and passengers on board the taxi fleeing for their lives.