Battle royal between FM and top ECOWAS official

A battle royal was raging over Ghana's airwaves Wednesday between Foreign Minister Hackman Owusu-Agyemang and the head of a west African regional bank who refused to take his marching orders from Accra.

George Yankey, the dismissed president of the ECOWAS Bank for Investment and Development, told the private Joy FM radio that his sacking from the top job was not valid.

"My appointment has not been terminated and I am still at post," the Lome-based Yankey said.

Yankey, however, admitted that he had received a letter dated April 23rd from the ECOWAS secretariat purportedly dismissing him.

"The letter breached the protocol of ECOWAS Fund. I, therefore, challeged it in a competent court of law in Nigeria. The court delivered an interlocutory injunction on May 25 this year restraining ECOWAS from disrupting my tenure as president of the ECOWAS Bank."

ECOWAS, or the Economic Community of West African States, was established in 1975 to promote economic integration of the region.

The Community, whose secretariat is based in the Nigerian capital Abuja, groups Benin, Burkina Faso, Cape Verde, the Gambia, Ghana, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Ivory Coast, Mali, Niger, Nigeria, Sierra Leone, Liberia, Senegal and Togo.

Foreign Minister Owusu-Agyemang meanwhile told the radio network that Yankey had lost his job.

"As far as ECOWAS is concerned, his appointment has been terminated. We as a government cannot continue to back somebody whose activities are under investigation for alleged malfeasance."

Yankey is currently under investigation in a 22-million-dollar grains fraud scandal dating from the regime of former president Jerry Rawlings, who ruled until December last year.

He alleged that the foreign minister had travelled to Gambia to get his counterpart to back moves to dismiss him.

Yankey also claimed Owusu-Agyemang wanted him out so that a close associate of the foreign minister, George Apenteng, could replace him.

The foreign minister dismissed both charges, adding: "I have checked with my colleague, the Foreign Minister of the Federal Republic of Nigeria and that the court action is null and void as ECOWAS has a diplomatic status. According to him this status was not waived.

"As far as the Ecowas governments are concerned, Dr. George Yankey has been dismissed. Period."