Manasseh Azure Awuni feels that there was selective justice in jailing only Abuga Pele in the Ghana Youth Employment and Entrepreneurial Development Agency (GYEEDA) scandal which he investigated and he [Abuga Pele] was implicated.

According to him, if there was anybody who had to go to jail with former National Coordinator of the defunct GYEEDA, Abuga Pele, then it is Clement Kofi Humado.

“In the GYEEDA scandal, if there were people who should have been investigated and companies, we are looking at Clement Kofi Humado who was the Youth and Sports Minister at the time, he signed fraudulent contracts that made us lose hundreds of millions of cedis and if you take the GYEEDA report, it is there,” Azure Awuni said on, ‘Moomen Tonight’.

He added, “you were giving money to somebody who hasn’t even started the work and whatever got done there is evidence of that. Clement Kofi Humado was never touched. Look at rlg, look at Zoomlion; so, Philip Assibit’s money was around four million cedis, he is in jail but these people made us lose hundreds of millions of cedis and nobody even dared to touch them.”

He disclosed, “My sources at the Attorney General's Department told me that in that case, they had about six people they were going to charge and there was a call that they should drop them and then charge only Abuga Pele and Philip Assibit. So, sometimes if there is anything that I feel pained about, it is because you have done a story, you and the state institutions and everybody involved know the big culprits yet somebody decides to leave them and go for the very vulnerable ones or those who do not have godfathers in the party or society.

“So, that selective justice is what hurts me about Abuga Pele’s imprisonment. And the worst thing was that Clement Kofi Humado was the prosecution witness against Abuga Pele,” Manasseh Azure Awuni stressed.

Background

Abuga Pele and Philip Akpeena Assibit stood trial for committing acts that led to the loss of GH¢4.1 million to the state.

Assibit pleaded not guilty to six counts of defrauding by false pretence and six counts of dishonestly causing loss to public property while Pele also pleaded not guilty to five counts of wilfully causing financial loss to the state, abetment of crime and intentionally misapplying public property.

The prosecution claimed that Pele, who was the National Coordinator of the agency when it was known as the National Youth Employment Programme (NYEP), entered into a contract with Assibit to engage in activities that did not inure to the benefit of the state.

The facts of the case, per the prosecution, are that in 2010, Pele entered into a memorandum of understanding (MoU) with the GIG, represented by Assibit, without any “recourse to the then sector Minister of Youth and Sports, Akua Sena Dansua, or the Attorney General’’.

Between May 2011 and May 2012, the prosecution said, Assibit made a number of payment claims for consultancy services ranging from “the provision of exit programmes for the NYEP to the provision of financial engineering services’’.

Assibit, the prosecution said, claimed his services led to the NYEP securing a World Bank facility of $65 million and also helped the agency to recruit 250 youth to support the implementation of what was known as the Youth Enterprises Development Programme.

The prosecution added that in August 2012, investigations revealed that Assibit was paid an additional “GH¢835,000 under the guise of what was referred to as tracer studies for the World Bank.”

Abuga Pele, a former Member of Parliament for Chiana-Paga in the Upper East Region, had always stated that he was only used as a scapegoat by the previous NDC government, whiles the real culprits were made to walk free.