I formed OccupyGhana, not Ace Ankomah - Kofi Bentil

Private Legal practitioner, Kofi Bentil, has cleared suggestions that social and political activist, Ace Ankomah is the brain behind the pressure group, OccupyGhana as many have believed over time.

According to Kofi Bentil, Ace Ankomah, like many others, had been informed about the group but joined only after several meetings by the founding fathers.

Speaking on the ’21 minutes with KKB’ show, Bentil emphasized, “This is the fact for the record that I formed what is now OccupyGhana. In fact, Ace Ankomah joined several meetings after. Some of the leading members now joined a number of meetings after they had been informed.”

Prior to joining the group himself, Kofi Bentil said he was contacted by his colleague Lawyer Nana Kwasi Awuah to join him and others in a protest called ‘Occupy Flagstaff House’ by non-partisan civil society group, Concerned Ghanaians for Responsible Governance (CGRG), to demonstrate against the economic hardship and the leadership paralysis which was being experienced in the country.

He argued that, the country was in shambles contrary to what then government, National Democratic Congress (NDC) told Ghanaians.

“…We did the Occupy Flagstaff House demonstration. It was organized by Lawyer Nana Akwasi Awuah and his friends called Concerned Ghanaians for Responsible Governance (CGRG)….”

He continued, “… it resonated well with me because I had gotten to a point around that time- and if you remember dumsor was terrible, the government was just not performing, everything was just going bad and at IMANI we had seen some of these things. We wrote a paper called ‘The Threat of Deacy’ when the government was coming into power and we talked about all the kinds of things that could happen if we didn’t tow a certain line.”

To him, former president John Agyekum Kufuor left the country in a good state but his works were destroyed by the NDC when they took over. He claimed that, despite warnings from policy think tank, IMANI, about the deteriorating state of the country, through their write-up, the NDC failed woefully in administering the country

“Truth is President Kufour left us a very good country. If you see from where we took off, he left us on a plane where we could have taken off but IMANI said if we do not do certain things right there is a ‘threat if decay’. We would go back and by the time we did Occupy Flagstaff House, we had sunk so low, we were in despair,” he said.