Press Release on Pianim’s Pronouncements of Presidential Bribery

Public Relations Committee NPP-USA

Kwame Pianim – Poster boy for Childishness and Gullibility

It happens to everyone. Someone you know and respect will do or say something that will cause your jaw to drop unguardedly. Then you spend the next several weeks trying to figure out what on earth was he or she thinking.

This scenario describes what many in the NPP are experiencing today. Until his awkward pronouncements, Kwame Pianim was regarded as a respected member of the NPP family. His bluntness is well documented even though he may not accurately be characterized as a loose canon. Now he may be the poster boy for loose talk, and worse, childishness due to his failure to know a sham when he supposedly saw one.

Honorable Kwame Pianim claims to have personally witnessed President Mills return brown envelopes containing bribes to wherever they came from. As such he concludes that President Mills “would not steal from Ghanaians.” That’s like seeing Hitler hugging a Jew in front of the cameras and concluding that Hitler may be a lover of Jews after all. The most dim-witted NPP functionary would know that Mills returning or declining a bribe in his or her presence is a staged act not worthy of serious mention. But in case Kwame Pianim does not still get it, here are a few perspectives.

First, we are talking about the President of the party on Mabey & Johnson. Bribe-taking is second-nature to them. In fact, John Evans Atta Mills was Vice President when the mother of all bribes were dished out by officials of Mabey & Johnson and accepted by the out-of-control NDC officials. Furthermore, President Mills has 24 hours and seven days to return any brown envelopes that had been sent to him. For him to make the point of coincidentally returning them during the few moments that Kwame Pianim was in his presence, smacks of a staged act not even rising to the level of a JSS play. If Kwame Pianim was anything close to the sophisticated elder that he has managed to fool many of us into believing, he should have seen through this poor act.

Second, since Kwame Pianim elected to drag in the names of the two former presidents, may be he can tell us the times and places when presidents Kufuor and Rawlings accepted similar brown envelopes. Pianim’s pronouncement can be substantive, only if he can prove that he has an around-the-clock vigil on these three presidents and has documented evidence of the first two ‘Johns,’ as he puts it, accepting bribes and the third ‘John’ rejecting them all the time. How can he tell if for every one brown envelope that Mills rejects in the presence of known adversaries, he accepts ten when he is alone or with trusted friends?

Third, what about the Police Boss Syndrome? Whether it is a known fact or a vicious rumor, police bosses have always been suspected of rounding up their street officers after their shift to account for the day’s ‘take.’ While they themselves may not directly accept bribes because they do not come into direct contact with the tro-tro drivers, word has it that they pressure the street officers to “increase their ‘sales’” at the end of their shift so that their own take-home payout would be increased. Given that Mills has been soft on Mubarak, Ayariga, M&J culprits, and a host of others, could he be the ‘police boss’?

Finally a few questions for Kwame Pianim: what relationship does he have with the opponents so as to be in such thick of things that issues as confidential as bribery are playing out in his full glare? Is he switching parties? What does he stand to gain by making such public pronouncements? Has he been a mole all this time? What did they feed him when they threw him in jail years ago that is just now germinating? If he had information about Kufuor and Rawlings’ culpability regarding bribery and corruption, why did he wait until now to bring it out? In trying to emerge as an anti-corruption crusader, has he compromised his own integrity?

There comes a time when sense and sensibility must prevail over yearnings for cheap publicity. In this ongoing saga, there is a lot on incongruous factors. The rule of thumb is that if it does not make sense, make sense out of it before going public. “The Kwame Pianim” that we all know would have made sense out of the many aspects of this charade before going public with his conclusions. Or may be we did not know him at all.