Honorable Amoateng Brings 'Investors' Home

Please don't tell me it ain't true and that I don't know what I am talking about. If the current noises in Accra and the rest of Ghana about a boom in the drugs industry are anything to go by, then indeed the long delayed return of the honorable MP has happened.

With a vengeance too, I should be quick to add. For beyond all the doctoring that goes on in the political circles, and the exchanges of vitriolic verbal bombs amongst certain public personalities, the stark reality of the current cocktails of drug scandals in Ghana is that we are reaping a rather "rich" harvest from the plantings of our hypocritical political elite.

You see, we should have known better. Our Yoruba cousins said it a long time ago that when in a procession with an Oba, and then he suddenly stops, raises his paunches and begins to undo some of his more sensitive coverlets, wise men know that he wants to be left alone. Others might choose to remain, but certainly, in instances like that, the bounty that Oba spreads might not be necessarily of the kind that would make for nostalgic memories.

When the now questionably honorable Member of Parliament for Nkoranza North, Eric Amoateng entered the books as an international drug peddler and was pushed behind the bars in Bush's country, strong reactions followed. Naturally, among the common electorate, there were those who were solidly behind him, and those who were strongly opposed to him. His political inclinations played a huge role in this divergence of opinions. But let's return to the adage above and while doing so, face an all too bitter truth. It doesn't take too much moral savvy to know that if we as a people establish a procession of honorables and one of them somewhere along the line decides to be a peddler of common shit, the least we can do is let him return to the dabbling in the mire, so that we can at least preserve the order of our honorable march.

For Amoateng's party-mates in particular, the case was very easy to deal with. As has been the case these past six years, people in the Kuffuor administration of the "zero tolerance for corruption" ways had better ideas than the rest of us. They spent the tax payer's money to send a delegation of moral nincompoops across the vast Atlantic into America just for the sake of this common criminal. What were they going to do? Convince the US Attorney General's Department to let him go like they would normally do to their favorites back in Ghana? Offer the incarcerated drug baron moral support? Negotiate a trial for him in a third country like Thailand or Taiwan or Togo or Tuvalu?

At the time, I wondered if it was prudent to embark on this journey on the pangs of our pockets. I also wondered whether gangster Atta Ayi's thieving comrades would publicly send a delegation to the precincts of Cocoa Affairs or Nsawan in order to support their beleaguered comrade. The conclusion I came to was that those petty amateur robbers won't because they know better than our sitting government. They know that even amongst a confederacy of dunces, if one falls out of line in such a way as to become obviously obtuse to the public, the rest, to at least keep the illusion of being serious, cease to associate with him.

But our government chose the strange route of sending a as-usual per-diem loaded delegation to America to perhaps keep vigil with the suspected drug baron that used to be called "honorable".

And while they were at it, their praise-singers in Accra and elsewhere took up their pens and started prophesying about how "he will return soon." Those who did not have pens fell back on their halitosis-laden mouths and began to chant the abracadabra formulas which they claimed would bring him home soon. We the bemused-but-willing-to-be-believers waited and waited and waited. The three days passed, and Jesus rose from the grave, but Amoateng did not come back. The seventh day passed, and God rested from his labors of creating the universe, and our Amoateng did not come back. The forty days passed and all the sojourning souls of the dead returned to where they started out originally, but Amoateng's exilic romance into a foreign dungeon dragged on.

" Mr. Amoateng, it was made known to us, had asked for permission. Permission to go and engage in business that would bring some much-needed dividends to the coffers of the beloved party of our patriots.

And faithful as he is, the man has finally come home. Perhaps not exactly in the way we thought he would, but come indeed he has. And he has brought friends too. From Venezuela all the way to some too-hard-to-spell royal court names, we have seen the grateful Amoateng return the honor by inspiring what now is an epidemic of drugs cartels across the country.

I hear the president is now very angry because some unpatriotic Ghanaians have been visiting drug-infested countries like Colombia and Venezuela. Funny thing is, the innocent members of his party do not commit any of these crimes of visitations, and yet somehow, it seems the devil has decided to stack their bags instead with the unholy kilos.

What else can I say? Being a good citizen who would not want to prejudice the outcome of cases in the courts-unlike others-and knowing just how heavy the burden of sitting on that committee must be for Justice Georgina Wood and her pals, I'll let matters rest for now.

Meanwhile, you my dear friends should join me in welcoming home the honorable MP for Nkoranza for deigning us the honor of this august visitation by proxy. For after all has been said and done, he is the great champion whose acts produced all these new guys. Yes, after our new zero-tolerance for drugs campaign is forgotten, we shall still remember the story of the baron who escobared his way into our highest law making body, and made such an impression that long after he became a common criminal in-mate in a common made-for-criminals US jail, they still sang his praises in the so-called private press in Ghana, and his place in parliament was kept sacrosanct by those of his fellows probably because the old adage about birds of a feather supporting each other still holds true.

Let me conclude this on a light note. Is the growth of a cocaine industry in Ghana not good news for the unemployed? An industry means new jobs, right? How many will benefit this time? Twenty million?