P. V. Obeng Is The Smoking Gun - How About Atta-Mills?

At long last, the cat is out of the bag! And on the preceding score, the allusion is to the ongoing high-court trial in Oslo, Norway, in which the Norwegian cement company SCANCEM, which also owns GHACEM – or Ghana Cement Company – has been brought up on charges of using payola, or bribery, to run subsidiary monopolies in a host of African countries, including Ghana, Liberia, Togo, Tanzania, Congo (DRC?), Sierra Leone, Niger, Nigeria and Gabon (see Kofi A. Boateng’s “Rawlings, Mrs. Rawlings, and P. V. Obeng: Did They, Or Didn’t They?” Ghanaweb.com 7/22/07).

In the aforementioned story, which was originally written and published in Norway under the translated title of “Gray Cement, Black Money,” by Geir Imset and Harald Vanik, we learn that during their self-righteous tenure in the 1980s and 1990s, Messrs. Rawlings and P. V. Obeng, the former’s putative prime minister, had payolas totaling nearly $ 3 million (American Dollars) transferred into their secret coded bank accounts through Barclays Bank, the notorious international banker whose vast capital resources were largely built on the backs of enslaved Africans in the Diaspora.

What makes the story quite intriguing, albeit unpardonably outrageous, is the fact that one of the Ghanaian principals does not deny the shocking fact that, indeed, a treasonable crime occurred in his underhanded dealings with SCANCEM, the Oslo-based cement parent-company of GHACEM. According to available documents, asked about what he did, in terms of work, to earn millions of U. S. dollars from SCANCEM, Mr. Obeng matter-of-factly stated: “I supplied them [i.e. SCANCEM] with information on the prevailing framework conditions [sic] at any given time for running a business, and updated them on political changes relating to the government” (Ghanaweb.com 7/22/07). This is what Americans call “Insider-Trading,” a crime punishable by reimbursement with severe penalties and long-term imprisonment.

In sum, as sound and reasonable interpretation of the salient drift of the documents indicates, what Messrs. Rawlings and Obeng appear to have done was to have asked for the aforementioned relatively piddling sum of payola in order to guarantee SCANCEM that Ghanaians would pay prohibitive market prices for this vital building material and thus facilitate the wanton harvest of humongous profits at the expense of their fellow Ghanaian citizens.

Needless to say, it was this sort of treasonable criminal activity, and others of far, far less magnitude and purely domestic in nature, than earned tens of hundreds of otherwise diligent and innocent Ghanaians the unprecedented and epic penalty of death by firing squad under the Rawlings junta. And so, in the days ahead, it would be quite interesting to learn of just what the Kufuor Government, armed with this proverbial “smoking gun” of palpable evidence, intends to do with it. And here, also, it goes without saying, if one were to seek the measured opinion of yours truly, that the least that the Kufuor Government ought to do should be to immediately demand that payolas deposited into the coded bank accounts of the Rawlingses and Mr. Obeng be returned to the Ghana Government Treasury, with interest and penalties, exactly as the P/NDC Abongo Boys had done to their victims under their terror-charged tenure.

Then also, it may be necessary to cast the proverbial investigative net wider to include such Rawlings associates as Professor John Evans Atta-Mills, the Tsikatas and the Ahwois, Drs. Obed Asamoah, Kofi Awoonor and Kwabena Adjei, among a host of other prominent and not-so-prominent principal players in this P/NDC scam-artistry. Indeed, this is the one area of national, judicial accountability that must not be preempted by the so-called Indemnity Clause; and neither ought this felonious crime be permitted to be flagrantly regulated by any Statutes of Limitation.

The preceding notwithstanding, the significant question to ask here is whether, in the case of Mr. P. V. Obeng, this principal player provided his so-called information on the prevailing framework conditions at any given time for running a business while also acting in his official capacity as the substantive number-two executive member of the Provisional National Democratic Congress (P/NDC), or as a private Ghanaian citizen. Either way, the treasonable crime of bribe reception at the expense of the socio-cultural and economic development of the Ghanaian people could not, in any manner, be mitigated.

On the other hand, if such criminal transaction, did, in fact, occur while Mr. Obeng served in his referenced official capacity, then, of course, appropriate steps must be promptly taken to ensure that this unconscionable act of “double-dipping” is rectified, in terms of the awarding of monetary damages to the sovereign state of Ghana.

Interestingly, on May 23, 2007, a fanatical P/NDC apparatchik, who shall be anecdotally called “Ms. Dearest,” wrote and posted an article titled “Examining the Nation’s Energy Crisis” on Ghanaweb.com, in which the writer mordantly castigated the Kufuor-led government of the New Patriotic Party (NPP) for deliberately ensuring that the largely poor Ghanaian citizenry would purchase a bag of cement at “exponentially” prohibitive prices. Perhaps the good and longsuffering people of Ghana ought to ask Ms. Dearest exactly what she knows but has yet to spill on this epic scandal, particularly since Ms. Dearest claims to have personally met Mr. Tor Nygarrd, a sometime diplomat and allegedly self-confessed payola courier for Messrs. Rawlings and Obeng, under some “accidental” circumstances, interestingly.

But, perhaps, what is even more intriguing is that rather than hold brief for or against her NDC ideological associates – or are they her sponsors? – Ms. Dearest prefers to castigate the astute and purposeful Mr. Nygarrd, the payola courier, for criminally breaching diplomatic protocol as a consul-general in Ghana for the interests of his country and also as an ambassador of Norway to a neighboring African country.

In sum, the fact that Ms. Dearest is not vehemently denying that, indeed, Messrs. Rawlings and Obeng are primarily responsible for Ms. Dearest’s own inability to purchase enough quantities of cement to build her lavish dream-house in Accra, in of itself, is an ineluctably fascinating narrative. Of course, she has dared the accusers of her sponsors to prove their case beyond the proverbial iota of a doubt. And on the face of it, this may appear to be an uphill task, in view of the fact that prosecutors in the Asker and Baerum High Court, where the aforementioned trial is being held in Oslo, Norway, are having an understandably hard time tracking the proverbial paper trail vis-à-vis Messrs. Rawlings and Obeng’s payola scam-artistry. Still, what does it matter to the rest of us on state-side, when Mr. Paul Victor Obeng has himself admitted to having taken huge sums of bribe moneys from SCANCEM, albeit in reciprocal exchange for “information on the prevailing framework conditions at any given time for running a business, and updated them on political changes relating to the government”? Political changes, indeed!

*Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph. D., teaches English and Journalism at Nassau Community College of the State University of New York, Garden City. He is the author of “The Tower Mafia,” a forthcoming account on America’s anti-African and anti-immigrant culture wars in the academy.