Akufo-Addo Should Not Have Encouraged Great Cape Greed

By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.

I have just read the news article captioned “Government Misfired on Nana Addo Great Cape Judgment Debt Controversy – Moustapha Hamid” (Joyonline.com 7/17/12), and could not help but observe something fishy, in terms of contractual good faith on the part of the alleged plaintiffs, the Great Cape Company, a supplier of clinker, a cement-producing ingredient, to the government of the day.

For starters, in 1978, Ghana had in power a military junta that was not legitimately constituted, judging by the Republican definition of democratic governance. What this means is that the Great Cape Company operatives ought to have wisely learned to cut their losses and accepted the final settlement deal of $927,000 offered them by the Rawlings-led National Democratic Congress (NDC) government in 1997.

Instead, we learn that either the executives and/or local representatives of the Great Cape Company preferred to quibble over a purported 11-year span of neglected interest payments on the original contractual principal, and so flatly refused to accept the above-noted good-faith payment offered by the Rawlings government.

Whatever the quiddities of the original contract signed between the erstwhile Supreme Military Council (SMC), I or II, and the Great Cape Company, one thing is certain: there were elements on both sides of the contract, as of 1997, that did not seem to be interested in protecting the paramount interest of the State and the proverbial Ghanaian taxpayer. Otherwise, representatives of the extant government could have vehemently insisted to the Great Cape Company representatives that the final offer of $927,000 was being made in good faith on a take-it-or-leave-it basis.

For one thing, those of us outside the loop of governance have no record as to whether the plaintiffs never breached any of their clinker supply schedules. If, in fact, they did, and there is no reason to believe that they did not (knowing how sluggishly business is routinely conducted in Ghana between the Government and the corporate sector), those delays in clinker supplies could readily and reasonably have been used by State representatives to beat back the patently palpable greed of the Great Cape Company executives.

Instead, and once again, what we have here clearly appears to be a Government side (of representatives and cabinet operatives) who were absolutely not the least bit interested in protecting the heavily burdened coffers of the State, the way they would be expected to have guarded their own.

Now, where Nana Akufo-Addo’s error in judgment comes up regards the official letter that the now-presidential candidate of the main opposition New Patriotic Party (NPP) is alleged to have written to the extant Minister of Finance, asking for a payment to be made to the Great Cape Company. One professionally expects that in 2001, as Ghana’s newly-appointed Attorney-General and Minister of Justice, Nana Akufo-Addo’s aforesaid letter had been duly copied to the plaintiffs. If so, then the former NPP-MP for Akyem-Abuakwa South ought to have flatly refused to “authenticate” the same letter to Dr. Nat Tanoh, the local representative of the Great Cape Company ten long years later! For, the forensically relevant question becomes: What prevented Dr. Tanoh between 2001 and 2011 from negotiating with the relevant government operatives to have his company paid the amount involved?

In other words, other than doing so purely on the informal basis of friendship – or something clearly bordering on the extra-professional – Nana Akufo-Addo ought not to have written his October 3, 2011 letter, allegedly seeking to authenticate his original letter of more than a decade earlier.

In essence, what I am clearly getting at here is that there ought to be some sort of Statutes of Limitation governing the way contracts are both negotiated and executed in Ghana. Otherwise, just about any private corporate entity could have their local collaborators surface out of the proverbial blue with documents dating from 1901, asking the Government of the day to pay for the cost of the British invasion of the Asante Federation, and the latter’s forcible incorporation into the modern State of Ghana. This is absolutely no joke, whatsoever, countrymen and women!

*Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D., is Associate Professor of English, Journalism and Creative Writing at Nassau Community College of the State University of New York, Garden City. He is Director of The Sintim-Aboagye Center for Politics and Culture and author of “Dr. J. B. Danquah: Architect of Modern Ghana” (iUniverse.com, 2005). E-mail: okoampaahoofe@optimum.net.

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