By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.
Garden City, New York
Dec. 17, 2015
E-mail: okoampaahoofe@optimum.net

I don’t know what Mr. Abraham Amaliba, still reeling from his crushing parliamentary primary defeat in Bolgatanga, was thinking when he farcically riposted that the allegedly criminal history of the AMERI Group’s contractual witness to the $510 million turbine-purchase scandal was irrelevant to the integrity of the government’s pact with the United Arab Emirates (UAE) firm (See “No Law Bars Crooks from Witnessing Deals – Amaliba” Classfmonline.com / Ghanaweb.com 12/15/15).

The so-called National Democratic Congress’ communicator would do his seriously damaged professional credentials some good by explaining why Mr. Umar Farooq Zahoor is reported to be listed on INTERPOL’s record of Most Wanted Criminals. And even more significantly, whether, as he would have his audiences believe, the INTERPOL has absolutely no relevance and/or credibility in the scheme of international relations as far as the Mahama-led government of the National Democratic Congress (NDC) is concerned. And why so?

The preceding notwithstanding, one can still perfectly appreciate the cynically blighted, or corrupt, reasoning of Mr. Amaliba, if also because the Mahama government is well-known to be chock-full of criminal elements. Indeed, so rankly criminal and corrupt are the overwhelming majority of the key operatives of the National Democratic Congress that an Indemnity Clause had to be inserted into Ghana’s Fourth-Republican Constitution as a salient condition for these rascally political parasites to democratically relinquish power or risk the possibility of an apocalyptic spillage of blood occurring in the country in a bid to bringing these unconscionable thugs to justice.

And so in a real sense, what one unmistakably hears Mr. Amaliba to be saying here is that Mr. Umar Farooq Zahoor is inescapably a striking mirror-image of most of the key operatives of the National Democratic Congress. And as the AMERI Group Scandal begins to gain the requisite clarity and traction, in terms of its flagrant enormity, before the Ghanaian electorate, the unpardonable criminality of the ministerial operatives of the Energy and Power ministries is apt to assume its proper moral and legal dimensions in our national court of public opinion. I bet Mr. Anas Aremeyaw Anas is wringing his hands over his telling inability to beat the two Norwegian VG magazine reporters to this epic scandal. Could this be because the astute lawyer-cum-journalist had been too close to and inexpediently and unwisely chummy with the pathologically corrupt Mahama regime?

I have absolutely no doubt in my mind that it was in a tactical attempt to muff up – or deflect – this epic act of criminality that prompted President John Dramani Mahama to schedule and present his so-called “Accounting to the People” national address in the wake of the AMERI Group exposé. Predictably, the President’s Town Crier, otherwise known as the Communications Minister, Dr. Edward Omane-Boamah, was widely reported to have lauded his paymaster for being the “best communicator” in postcolonial Ghanaian history. I don’t know how serious Dr. Omane-Boamah, who has approximately the same expertise in communications and rhetoric as yours truly has in medical knowledge and practice, expected Ghanaians to take such a sycophantically comical remark.

Indeed, the criminal record of Mr. Umar Farooq Zahoor is relevant precisely because it very likely played a huge role in the decision by the Mahama government to use the Dubai-based AMERI Group as a middle-man in the transaction, when the Government of Ghana could directly have negotiated with the US-based General Electric (GE), the manufacturer of 225-MW turbines involved in the deal. We are also told that the Norwegian investigative reporters who exposed the AMERI Group scam had obtained forensically sustainable evidence indicating that if the Government of Ghana had directly contracted with the American manufacturer of the turbines, these 10 power generators would have cost the Ghanaian taxpayer some $220 million and not the criminally inflated $510 million that we are presently saddled with. If this is not a patent act of criminality, Mr. Amaliba must explain to the voting Ghanaian taxpayer what it is.

And let no unconscionable cynic accuse yours truly of playing politics with this otherwise fundamentally quality-of-life issue. The very timing of the delivery of the turbines, barely a year to Election 2016, eloquently testifies to the ineluctably political nature of the project. It could also well be that some backdoor campaign-financing boondoggle was suavely built into the deal. Then also, it is rather risible for a President who just a couple of weeks ago was telling the very people who offered him his electoral mandate that they had absolutely no constitutional right, whatsoever, to either critique or criticize his job performance to be hosting a media forum to make believe that he was also the most accountable and responsible politician in the history of modern Ghana.