By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.
Garden City, New York
Dec. 25, 2015
E-mail: okoampaahoofe@optimum.net

The decision by Presidential Chief-of-Staff Julius Debrah to cause the retrieval of the GHC 1.9 million contractual profit-margin excess paid by the Government to the Smartty Management Company, in connection with the rebranding of some 116 state-owned and operated intra-city buses, will not amount to the proverbial hill of beans. To be certain, it reeks of the patently silly and may well have been initiated as a facile method of scoring cheap electioneering points in the lead-up to Election 2016.

Trust me, Ghanaians are not that naïve and stupid, Mr. Debrah (See “AG not likely to Retrieve GHC 1.9 M – MP” MyJoyOnline.com / Ghanaweb.com 12/25/15). If he were the least bit imbued with the sort of wisdom that Alhaji Asoma Banda has virulently accused the three-time Presidential Candidate of the main opposition New Patriotic Party (NPP) of sorely lacking, President John Dramani Mahama and his right-hand man would rather focus their attention and energies on retrieving the whopping GHC 52 million creamed off our national treasury by Mr. Alfred Agbesi Woyome, the notorious major underwriter of the ruling National Democratic Congress (NDC).

The comfort of power and influence may have caused him to so soon forget this, but most Ghanaians still vividly remember that one of the first promises that Mr. Mahama made, shortly after succeeding to the Presidency, in the wake of the July 24, 2012 passing of then-President John Evans Atta-Mills, was to ensure that “every pesewa illegally taken from the people of Ghana” was returned to exactly where it was taken from. Some three-and-half years later, the President has yet to make good on this promise.

Indeed, what the former Rawlings Communications Minister has done is to actually plunge the country into more fiscal scam-artistry. As Ms. Adwoa Osei-Asare, the New Patriotic Party’s Member of Parliament for Atiwa-East Constituency, in my neck of the country, had occasion to aptly point out, Attorney-General Marietta Brew Appiah-Oppong may be the country’s least efficient holder of her cardinal cabinet portfolio. To-date, the Attorney-General has yet to collect a pesewa from Mr. Woyome. And this comes in the wake of the unanimous Supreme Court decision to the damnable effect that, indeed, Mr. Woyome scammed the state out of money he absolutely had no right, whatsoever, to or was entitled to, despite the fact of him having apparently been able to convince an evidently cognitively crocked and pathologically corrupt former Attorney-General Betty Mould-Iddrisu and her equally harebrained and incurably corrupt deputy, Mr. Ebo Barton-Odro.

Then we also have the epic scandals of RLG (the Agambilla Group) and Zoomlion, the apparently more theoretical than practical sanitation company under President Mahama’s pet GYEEDA project. That the tribalistic and ethnically chauvinist GYEEDA scam makes the President at least as morally corrupt as the operatives of the firms he has decided to go after cannot be gainsaid. If the country were blessed with a Parliament worthy of its nominal designation, Speaker Edward Doe Adjaho, Majority Leader Alban Bagbin and Minority Leader Osei Kyei Mensah-Bonsu would have since long launched a probe into the evidently shady dealings of the Chief Occupant of the Flagstaff House.

Well, even as Ms. Osei-Asare, the Atiwa-East MP, rightly points out, the order by Mr. Debrah, the Presidential Chief-of-Staff, for Attorney-General Appiah-Oppong to retrieve the ill-gotten money from the proprietor of Smartty Management Company may itself be illegal, as it lacks any legal or judicial backing. Besides, like the odious judgment-debt scandals, this brazen attempt at strong-arming Smartty Management Company could well end up costing the Government and the Ghanaian taxpayer far more than we bargained for.

Like it or not, Smartty Management – I nearly wrote “Smarty Pants” – entered into a legally binding contractual compact with the government whose flagrant abrogation would not be that simple. Yes, procurement guidelines laid down by Parliament may have been violated by the Flagstaff House, but this is primarily because, as we also learn, the owner-proprietor of Smartty Management is a National Democratic Congress stalwart. Which further inextricably incriminates the Presidency vis-à-vis the conduct of the entire affair.

The Akufo-Addo-led New Patriotic Party may have slogged through 2015 convulsively wracked by factional strife; now it is the turn of the Mahama-led National Democratic Congress to prove that it can be trusted to wisely and efficiently manage the people’s money. This, I confidently predict, is bound to be the NDC agenda in the lead-up to Election 2016. And Messrs. Akufo-Addo and Bawumia had better learn fast how to perennially put the Mahama Posse on the defensive or kiss their third shot at the presidency goodbye.

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