By Otchere Darko

“According to the MP, it is an in-law of his who has been arrested for drug offences and wondered how that should translate into he being a drug baron.”

The above was one of the explanations allegedly given by Hon Kennedy Agyepong for being "pushed to the wall in making the comments that suggested Kwasi Twum had something to do with drug trafficking, a comment which got the latter's lawyers issuing a 24-hour ultimatum to Mr. Agyapong to retract and apologise or face a legal suit” [Culled from Ghanaweb General News of Monday, 21 March 2011 which was headed “Kennedy Agyapong: I am sorry, I was pushed to the wall”; Source: Joy Online].

It is interesting to note that Hon Kennedy Agyepong has come out boldly to admit his libellous utterance against the CEO of Multimedia, Mr Twum. By his admission, the flamboyant NPP MP is saying it is indefensible in law for a victim of libel to reciprocate the pain or harm he is suffering by libelling back another person or other persons. What Hon Agyepong also ought to have known is the fact that he has long been “perceived” by several Ghanaians to be someone who was previously dealing in drugs. I personally first heard this rumour somewhere around the year 2004 or 2005, while being taxied past a building that was being put up at Madina Junction in Accra. I was told by the taxi driver that the owner of the seemingly “huge building” was a drug dealer. The driver went on further to mention the actual name of the owner. I was also told that another building project going on nearby belonged to that man’s sister whose husband had been jailed outside Ghana for a drug offence. Such “rumours” become topics of discussion among taxi drivers and their passengers, market women selling and buying, workers at their workplaces and passers-by who walk around us. This is how rumours start and spread in Ghana. Rumour-mongering is rife and high wherever and whenever there is lack of information. If somebody puts up a building that is so huge and which appears costly to build, there will always be questions asked as to how the person got the money to put up such building in a poor country like Ghana. Similarly, if a Ghanaian imports into Ghana a car that only multi-millionaires of world-class stature can buy, people are bound to ask questions. And people who ask those questions do so rightly, as long as they cannot find evidence of the legal sources of income of the people who put up such costly buildings, or who buy such expensive cars.

In my opinion, it is time laws were made in Ghana to allow a specified State institution, body, agency or department to be charged with the responsibility of inviting and asking Ghanaians who make certain extraordinary expenditures to provide evidence of their sources of income. Creating such laws and enforcing them to get Ghanaians to give and explain the sources of their incomes in situations of “doubt” should not be seen as an infringement into people’s individual rights. Instead, such laws and their enforcement should be seen as good for Ghana, for several reasons. These reasons include, firstly, the fact that such laws and their enforcement will reduce speculation, suspicion and rumour-mongering. Secondly, it will cut down on the need for Ghanaians to make statements that are based on rumours and speculations and which can sometimes constitute defamation and create serious human relations problems and costly civil law suits. Thirdly, the existence and enforcement of such laws in Ghana will promote public and private accountability in the country, and lead to a reduction in corruption, abuse of public office and other criminal pursuits of financial and pecuniary nature. Above all, the existence and enforcement of such laws will help to make evidential distinction between Ghanaians who genuinely make “clean money” and those who get rich through “foul means”, such as through corruption, exploitation, drug-dealing, “419 crimes”, and other criminalities. *What is being suggested in this article should be additional to any existing laws that require some Ghanaian public office holders to declare their assets. Asset declaration on its own does not help to bring out people who acquire wealth illegally in Ghana. There should be the establishment of this additional power vested in a State body to investigate and act on “hearsays” and “rumours”, as well as on what staff members of such authorised body gather from observation and investigation of Ghanaians who display individual exceptional and unexplainable wealth in all walks of Ghanaian life.

This nation will never become “clean” unless it begins to ask Ghanaians and non-Ghanaian residents in Ghana to say and explain how they come by the monies that enable them to make the expensive and hard-to-explain expenditures they make in this country and outside, as long as such facts become public and cause bases for suspicion.

Source: Otchere Darko; [This writer is a centrist, semi-liberalist, pragmatist, and an advocate for “inter-ethnic cooperation and unity”. He is an anti-corruption campaigner and a community-based development protagonist. He opposes the negative, corrupt, and domineering politics of NDC and NPP and actively campaigns for the development and strengthening of “third parties”. He is against “a two-party only” system of democracy {in Ghana}....... which, in practice, is what we have today.]