Ousted AG Amidu Eloquently Articulates

What Ghanaians Have Always Known

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

In his latest critique of the Mills-Mahama government of the National Democratic Congress (NDC), the dismissed Attorney-General and Minister of Justice, Mr. Martin ABK Amidu, poignantly details several signal instances of gross administrative incompetence which evince the indisputable fact of both Messrs. John Evans Atta-Mills and John Dramani Mahama having knowingly and deliberately presided over a regime of unprecedented rot and the inexorable and criminal bleeding of our national economy (See “Martin Amidu Strips Mahama; Exposes More Rot in NDC” Modernghana.com 10/8/12).

The problem with Mr. Amidu’s critique inheres in the pathetically lame attempt of the critic to make an untenable exception of his late boss. And this is really pathetic because it was Mr. Amidu’s widely reported and documented valorous and unstinting attempt to expose rank corruption in the Mills-Mahama government that precipitated his summary and decidedly rude ousting from the same government. On the latter score, the critic minces no words in letting on to the discerning reader that when it came to the unsavory practice of corruption, the late President Mills was a prime incubator.

In other words, while he himself did not directly dip his fingers into the national till or coffers, President Mills rather hypocritically preferred to put an airtight lid on the corrupt activities of his lackeys by pretending as if all was well and good. Consequently, Mr. Amidu, implicitly, prefers to envisage his former boss more in terms of him being a political weakling than either a veritable villain or vermin.

The fact of the matter, though, is that the abject lack of resolute political will and/or leadership equally amount(s) to the horrid acceptance of moral turpitude on the part of the subject. For instance, the critic details how in the wake of the shady purchasing of five military aircraft – Mr. Amidu erroneously and rather surprisingly pluralizes “aircraft” in several instances in his write-up – President Mills set up a crackerjack panel of investigators to determine whether the proper course of action, or protocol, had been pursued, only to abruptly scuttle the same anti-corruption control mechanism under great pressure. In this instance, the former Attorney-General leaves the reader in absolutely no doubt that the now-President John Dramani Mahama had been formidably integral to such protective cover-up.

Interestingly, though, Mr. Amidu does not make any direct and forensically sustainable charges against Transitional-President Mahama, except to confidently observe that should a bi-partisan parliamentary panel of investigators be established to enquire into the affairs of the Mills-Arthur government, the outcome would definitely be both flabbergasting and morally unsightly and decidedly unflattering. Still, where I am on the same page with Mr. Amidu regards the inexcusable absurdity of a sitting President Mahama daring his political opponents and perceived detractors to appeal to prosecutorial panels established by the former NDC-MP from Bole-Bamboi himself to investigate the same subject on charges related to the “flagrant rape of the public purse by Ministers and their NDC collaborators in this Government.”

In the quite acute words of Mr. Amidu, President Mahama would be grossly mistaken to suppose that he could fool middle-class Ghanaian intellectuals like the critic himself, by cavalierly presuming to play referee and defender in his own goal-mouth.

*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 “Selected Political Writings” (Lulu.com, 2008). E-mail: okoampaahoofe@optimum.net. ###