Why blame me after telling police, media about 500 missing excavators – Oppong-Nkrumah

Information Minister, Kojo Oppong Nkrumah, has refuted allegations by the former Minister of Environment, Science, Technology, and Innovation, Prof Kwabena Frimpong-Boateng, accusing him of being behind a plot to bring him down in his fight against illegal small-scale mining, popularly known as galamsey.

Prof Frimpong-Boateng in a report on illegal small-scale mining (galamsey) in Ghana, said that Oppong Nkrumah hatched a plot to bring him down over his fight against the menace.

In a statement dated April 21, Oppong Nkrumah said that it was Professor Frimpong-Boateng himself who reported to the police that there were 500 missing excavators and also granted media interviews to that effect.

Therefore, he questioned why the former minister would blame him for any information regarding the issue.

“…indeed, the facts are that it was Prof Boateng himself who wrote to the Ghana Police Service in January 2020 reporting the loss of some excavators and calling for an investigation. It was Prof Boateng himself who in subsequent media interviews mentioned that the number of excavators missing was about 500.

“Again, on or around February 20, 2020, it was Prof Boateng himself who at Parliament House (During interviews on the SONA) engaged in exchanges with the media about the said excavators and promised that they will be recovered.

“For the record, these are the matters that occasioned the media reports about Prof Boateng and the said excavators. Further, it was Prof Boateng himself who was later to be seen in a video making comments about the anti-galamsey fight and the release of excavators.”

He added “I Kojo Oppong Nkrumah was not responsible for his initial police report, his subsequent interviews, or any of the claims he made. To be clear, it was Prof Boateng’s own reports, interviews, and videos that generated his media challenges around the time. I am thus disappointed that he would, in this document, seek to blame me for the media reports,” the statement said.

What Prof Frimpong Boateng wrote about Oppong Nkrumah in his galamsey report:

A report by the Chairman of the dissolved Inter-Ministerial Committee on Illegal Mining (IMCIM), Professor Kwabena Frimpong-Boateng to President Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo cited Information Minister, Kojo Oppong-Nkrumah as scheming to run him down.

The 37-page report filed by the former Minister for Environment, Science and Technology dated March 19, 2021, was to brief the president about the work of the Committee in its fight against illegal mining and the “way forward.”

One of the big names indicted in the report is the Minister for Information who according to Mr Frimpong Boateng gathered and incited a team of journalists to attack him.

“On Saturday the 8th of February 2020. Mr. Kojo Oppong-Nkrumah, the Minister for Information assembled a group of journalists from both NDC and NPP-affiliated media houses at the Forest Hotel in Dodowa to discuss a strategy to bring me Kwabena Frimpong-Boateng down. Whilst they were there a journalist from among the group called a friend of mine, also a journalist, and informed him about the plot that was being hatched. He further informed my friend to watch out for headlines in some newspapers in the days following the meeting,” he stated in the report.

“On Monday, 10' February 2020, the INFORMER Newspaper, whose Editor was at the meeting had the Banner Headline on its front page as reproduced below:

“As if that was not enough on Thursday, 13th February 2020 at the 71st Cabinet Meeting, Mr. Oppong-Nkrumah in his regular report to Cabinet talked about news that was trending in the week.

“The first thing he mentioned was Frimpong-Boateng and 500 missing excavators,” the former minister said.

As part of his report, Prof. Frimpong Boateng alleged that some members of the Committee including Kojo Oppong Nkrumah sabotaged his work.

“It must be noted that Mr. Oppong-Nkrumah, as Minister for Information, was a member of the IMCIM and he never called me to find out what I knew about ‘missing excavators’ but he found it worthwhile to magnify it in press and also present the falsehood before Cabinet for reasons best known to him and his co-conspirators. If Kojo Oppong-Nkrumah and the likes of him have presidential ambitions they should pursue it on merit and not attempt to destroy a hard working patriot, whose only ambition is work to achieve a Ghana Beyond Aid,” the report captured.

“After the 2020 general election, Oppong-Nkrumah on many occasions attributed the below expectation performance of the NPP to the Government's management of the ‘banking crisis and the galamsey fight’. The fact is that those who did not vote for the NPP in the galamsey areas were not the miners but rather the hundreds of thousands of people living in the communities bordering the forests reserves, who were being harassed by mining companies such as Heritage Imperial,” he added.

Read Oppong Nkrumah’s full statement below:



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AM/SARA