By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.
Garden City, New York
Sept. 25, 2015
E-mail: okoampaahoofe@optimum.net
He sat on the Governing Board of the Bui Dam Project, while also producing cement blocks and selling them at collusively agreed upon exorbitant prices to the Bui Dam Authority. The colluder was, of course, BDA Chairman Jabesh Amissah-Arthur, the younger brother of Ghana’s Vice-President Kwesi Bekoe Amissah-Arthur. And so there is every reason to doubt that the General-Secretary of the ruling National Democratic Congress has the moral authority and credibility to lecture Ghanaians on what it means to be saddled with an abjectly corrupt judiciary (See “An Upright Judiciary Will Help Fight Corruption – Asiedu-Nketia” Starrfmonline.com / Ghanaweb.com 9/25/15).
Mr. Johnson Asiedu-Nketia is corrupt to the marrow, and so it is not clear just who the man popularly known as General Mosquito thinks he is fooling. The fact of the matter is that the Mahama-led National Democratic Congress has been fighting everything except corruption. We need to also significantly remind ourselves that it is the executive arm of government that sets the tone and climate for the other two arms of the central government, namely, the legislature and the judiciary. So far, the double-dipping appointment of parliamentarians as members of the cabinet is wreaking untold functional havoc on the legislature, with cabinet appointees running undue interference for the Flagstaff House. This is one of the fundamental problems which the key operatives of the National Democratic Congress ought to be talking about, and devising a means strengthening our august National Assembly.
To be certain, if he had wanted to, Mr. Anas Aremeyaw Anas could have focused the lenses of his video cameras on members of the executive and the legislature and come up with similar lurid pictures of rank and fetid rot. They would almost definitely have been far more impressive or telling. We know, for instance, that the now-President John Dramani Mahama was under investigation for embezzlement at the time of the death of his former boss and predecessor, President John Evans Atta-Mills. We will never know what the outcome of the alleged investigation into the airplane-purchase funds heist would have been. And that is a great tragedy. Instead, though, what Mr. Mahama has mischievously resorted to in recent months, has been to have the now Supreme Court member, Justice Yaw Apau, hastily conduct solo “investigations” into judgment-debt cases involving his main political opponents, with a view to embarrassing and irreparably tarnishing their image and reputations. Mr. Mahama’s most recent target of such image assassination was the 2016 Presidential Candidate of the main opposition New Patriotic Party (NPP), Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo.
We need to also quickly point out that the last seven years of Ghanaian political has been dominated by the Mills-Mahama and, presently, the Mahama/Amissah-Arthur-led rag-tag government of the National Democratic Congress. And so it would be quite in order for any critic to squarely fault the NDC for having irresponsibly presided over the culture of rank corruption among members of the judiciary. Mr. Asiedu-Nketia is spot on when he observes that “an upright judiciary is non-negotiable.” He would have been even more accurate, if the NDC’s General-Secretary had also equally poignantly observed that “an upright executive is indispensable in the fight against corruption” in government and the civil service.
