By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.

During his campaign for the presidency last year, Mr. Mahama solemnly promised to expedite the prosecution of Mr. Alfred Agbesi Woyome, the widely alleged major National Democratic Congress (NDC) financier, as well as cause some GHC 52 million to be retrieved and promptly returned to the coffers of the state, from which Mr. Woyome and some highly placed Mills-Mahama cabinet appointees had used false pretences to filch or pilfer.

And then, during the second Institute for Economic Affairs-sponsored presidential debate, Mr. Mahama showed his true colors as a brash and brazen ally of unpatriotic Ghanaian scam-artists, when he curiously faulted the erstwhile Kufuor-led New Patriotic Party administration for instigating Mr. Woyome in his criminal quest to fleecing the proverbial Ghanaian taxpayer, although every available evidence pointed to the fact that Mr. Woyome had not been stiffed out of any contractual agreement and/or assignment with the Kufuor government.

That the Woyome scandal precipitated the transfer of one Attorney-General and the dismissal of another, whose crusading efforts to getting Mr. Woyome to return his pelf to state coffers, dauntingly tells about the virtually hopeless extent of rank corruption among the executive echelons of the National Democratic Congress. And now, a newly appointed Attorney-General and Minister of Justice has been publicly and vehemently accused by her predecessor, Mr. Martin A. B. K. Amidu, the dismissed Attorney-General, for being complicit in Mr. Woyome's successful bilking of the state to the humongous tune of GHC 52 million.

And so when Mr. P. C. Appiah Ofori, the recently retired New Patriotic Party (NPP) Member of Parliament for Asikuma-Odoben-Brakwa, just the other day asserted in a radio interview that the apparently inordinate prolongation of the prosecution of the Woyome scandal had more to do with the fact of too many officials and cabinet appointees of the erstwhile Mills-Mahama government, and now the Mahama-Arthur government, being implicated in the same, the maverick and straight-shooting statesman could not have been more dead-on accurate in his observation.

But whether because of the widely alleged implication of too many state prosecutors in the Woyome scandal, thereby creating a patent conflict-of-interest situation, the case ought to be deliberately drawn out in order for it to die a proverbially natural death, while hundreds of thousands of law-abiding Ghanaian citizens suffered abject economic deprivation, is one over which a plenary national conference ought to be held in the offing. The preceding may well also be among the primary reasons why Messrs. Afari-Gyan and Dramani Mahama are widely believed to have criminally collaborated in usurping the majority mandate of the Ghanaian electorate in order to perennially entrench, as well as protect, these criminally culpable suspects in the august seat of governance, thereby indefinitely preempting the prompt and swift administration of justice.

It is also the reason why the 1.5 tons of Iran-bound and Turkih-impounded gold bars may never find their way back to Ghana and their rightful owners, the good and hardworking citizens of Ghana, if the Mahama-led National Democratic Congress government is irreligiously allowed to have its way.

___________________________________________ *Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D. Department of English Nassau Community College of SUNY Garden City, New York March 3, 2013 ###