Nana Ato Dadzie Cannot Fool Anyone

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

Garden City, New York

March 22, 2015

E-mail: okoampaahoofe@optimum.net

The failure of Attorney-General Marietta Brew Appiah-Oppong to subpoena her predecessor, Mrs. Betty Mould-Iddrisu, to testify as a witness in the GHC 51 million Woyome Heist demonstrates the Attorney-General's gross professional incompetence. And one wonders why she decided to accept the post of President Mahama's Chief Legal Counsel. Or better yet, on what basis did the President appoint Mrs. Appiah-Oppong his Attorney-General, short of the fact of the appointee's being the holder of a Legon law degree and a legal practitioner in the same chamber as Mr. Anthony Lithur, the man who led Mr. Mahama's legal defense team in the 2012 Presidential-Election Petition?

Through her counsel, Nana Ato Dadzie, Mrs. Mould-Iddrisu is reported to have claimed that as a former cabinet appointee who had been sworn to secrecy, she could only have served as a prosecution witness in the Woyome case on condition of having her oath-of-secrecy lifted by either President Mahama, the man who swore her to the same, or by a legitimately constituted court of law. If Mrs. Appiah-Oppong had absolutely no knowledge of the preceding, then it goes without saying that for her to have accepted her present cabinet portfolio was tantamount to the very height of abject dishonesty.

Recently, Mrs. Appiah-Oppong was widely quoted as having said that she was afraid that if she had compelled Mrs. Mould-Iddrisu to testify for the prosecution in the Woyome Heist, the former Attorney-General may well have turned out to be a hostile prosecution witness. This observation is, of course, abjectly naive and one that scandalously verges on a borderline case of mental retardation, for Mrs. Mould-Iddrisu could definitely not have become a hostile prosecution witness, for the simple reason that she was the cabinet appointee who, together with his deputy, Mr. Ebo Barton Od[u]ro, authorized the fraudulent payout of the GHC 51 million to Mr. Alfred Agbesi Woyome.

Nana Ato Dadzie, counsel for Mrs. Mould-Iddrisu, claims that his client merely committed "an administrative error," and that Mrs. Mould-Iddrisu ought to have been granted some form of prosecutorial immunity in order to clear the way for her to testify (See "Woyome Scandal: Betty Mould Was Ready To Testify But... - Ato Dadzie" MyJoyOnline.com / Ghanaweb.com 3/23/15). Now this is very strange because there is credible evidence pointing to Mrs. Mould-Iddrisu's prior knowledge of the fact that Waterville, the construction company in whose name Mr. Woyome had presumed to willflly defraud the State, had been fully contractually satisfied by the erstwhile Kufuor-led government of the New Patriotic Party (NPP).

It therefore clearly appears that Mrs. Mould-Iddrisu was privy to the preceding information but adamantly chose to ignore it anyway, perhaps on express orders from above or simply on grounds of ideological intransigence of the kind blindly pursued by successive governments since January 1966. Or it could simply be that an economically straitened National Democratic Congress, recently emerged from an 8-year's life of penury on the gray margins of mainstream Ghanaian politics, had to devise any means deemed necessary, including statal extortion, to shore up its coffers as well as line the wallets and pocket-books of its key operatives.

This well appears to have been the case, when one reckons the fact of the vehement and apologetic public defense mounted for Mr. Woyome by a visibly terminally ill President John Evans Atta-Mills in the wake of the initial revelation of the Woyome Heist, even long before legal proceedings by the State in retrieval of Mr. Woyome's loot had begun. In sum, it simply cannot be that then-Attorney-General Betty Mould-Iddrisu committed a routine "administrative error" in authorizing the payment of the killer-sum of GHC 51 million to her party's putatively foremost financier, as Nana Ato Dadzie has cynically suggested. It was clearly a proverbial accident according to plan; and it was inescapably criminal. And Mrs. Betty Mould-Iddrisu was a willing and active front-woman and architectural scam-artist of the worst kind.

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