Ghana Is Not On The Right Track, Mr. Mahama!

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

Just five days after the head of security services at Ghana's main international airport, the Kotoka, was arrested at the John F. Kennedy International Airport, in New York City, President John Dramani Mahama, just arrived back home from a whirwind tour of France and Japan, largely in shameless solicitation of development aid, jauntily declared the country to be set on the right track.

We shall in due course return to this rather weird declaration by the leader of a country whose very electoral legitimacy is being hotly contested in the Supreme Court. For now, we have decided to focus our readers' attention on the epic busting of Mr. Solomon Adelaquaye who, until his June 3, 2013 nabbing by operatives of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA), was director of security services at the Kotoka International Airport.

We are told that U.S. undercover agents, posing as big-time drug dealers and couriers, had approached the 48-year-old Mr. Adelaquaye with a business proposal that the latter, a widely reported financier of the ruling National Democratic Congress (NDC), found to be too fetching to resist. He would help his new-found business partners to export several thounsand kilograms of heroin into the United States, in exchange for the reciprocal importation of about 3,000 kilograms of cocaine to Ghana for transshipment to southern Africa and Asia (See "Busted 'Drug Baron' Had Connections In Gov't - NPP" JoyOnline.com/Ghanaweb.com 6/9/13; Also, "Ghana's Ex-Airport Security Chief Caught In Heroin Sting" Bloomberg.com 6/6/13).

If this is what Mr. Mahama means by his "Better Ghana Agenda," then we are, indeed, in deep trouble. But that this epic busting of the country's top airport security capo is likely to negatively impact investor confidence in our country cannot be gainsaid.

At any rate, the call by the General-Secretary of the main opposition New Patriotic Party (NPP) for the Mahama government to launch a full-scale investigation into how Sohin Security, the firm operated by Mr. Adelaquaye, secured its bid to provide security services for the KIA, may not be very productive.

Rather, as a government poised to imminently taking over from the embattled Mahama-led National Democratic Congress, Mr. Kwadwo Owusu-Afriyie ought to be frantically huddling and brainstorming with his key New Patriotic Party associates on ways and means of thoroughly revamping the ramshackle state of security affairs at both the KIA and the nation at large.

The recent rash of market fires and the deadly incidents of armed robbery in several regions and municipalities across the country are no positive indicators of the Mahama government's being confidently in charge of the affairs for which the NDC and Dr. Kwadwo Afari-Gyan, the electoral commissioner, claim Ghanaian voters to have decisively offered their mandate to Mr. Mahama and the NDC during last December's general election.

As for the purported fears expressed by the late President John Evans Atta-Mills a couple of years ago, that some staunch government insiders may be complicit in the narcotic-drug trade, it is nothing to credit the deceased premier for. For, needless to say, President Atta-Mills was a major and integral player of the Rawlings government that made the drug trade part and parcel of the country's erstwhile faux-socialist economy.

Maybe this unpardonable national blight was what he was alluding to, when during his 34th anniversary celebration of the so-called June 4 Revolution, the former Chairman Jerry John Rawlings caustically accused Messrs. John Agyekum-Kufuor and Atta-Mills of having flagrantly reversed the most sterling achievements of his 19-year reign-of-terror.

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

Department of English

Nassau Community College of SUNY

Garden City, New York

June 9, 2013

E-mail: okoampaahoofe@optimum.net

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