Payola Pan-Africanism

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

I just pulled up an article captioned “Rot at STC: GH¢ 81 million Used for Bribery” on Ghanaweb.com (8/12/10). The article details how a commission of inquiry set up by the Atta-Mills government has uncovered a payola, or bribery, network established by the State Transport Corporation (STC) to collect considerable sums of money from passengers traveling to and from neighboring West African cities like Abidjan, Cotonou and Ouagadougou as payments to customs officers in order to facilitate smooth passage.

Gee, and I have for long thought that free and easy access across our national boundaries was a central tenet of the foundation of the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS). These payolas are, of course, in addition to full transport fares that passengers who opt for service from the nation’s largest human carrier have to pay in order to secure a seat on a publicly-owned coach.

Domestically speaking, this kind of news would be deemed pedestrian and readily dismissed. But when a transportation system run by the Government of Ghana, or any other legally recognized government, for that matter, decides to enter into an informal agreement with corrupt customs officials of a neighboring country, then, needless to say, this ought to give great cause for concern. For what this means is that responsible governance and the moral authority that ought to accompany the same have been criminally ceded to private individuals.

What makes matters even worse is that these customs/immigration officials are on the public dole and thus regularly awarded salaries for supposedly holding onto their jobs as tax collectors and safety inspectors of their countries. Of course, the reader does not need to be informed that the unsavory culture of bribery aims to relax safety standards as well as shortchange government access to revenue needed to function efficiently. It also means that the public is being asked to abet in its own extortion. This simply defies common sense. And we have not even begun to talk about the flagrantly deleterious impact of such a practice on national development.

This particular story, however, has a cheap propagandistic edge to it – and it is simply to deviously plant in the public’s mind that, somehow, this culture of cross-boundary (or international) bribery was introduced into our country by the Kufuor-led New Patriotic Party (NPP). Consequently, the inquiry commission’s terms of reference spanned the period between 2000 and 2009. Needless to say, were the Atta-Mills government really interested in eradicating this cross-border culture of bribery, the commission would have been advised to examine the nearly 20-year period during which Ghana’s so-called Fourth Republic has been in existence.

The Government would, no doubt, have been soundly embarrassed by the extent to which the self-righteous operatives of the NDC facilitated and/or even refined such regressive culture of cross-border bribery into a classical art form.

That the practice is a two-way street, with Ghanaian customs officials as willing and willful participants, means that a great loss of revenue has occurred as well on our side of the borders. In sum, rather than simply apprise the public of exactly how much money was involved in payola transactions, the commission would do Ghanaians far better service by informing us of exactly how much money that ought to have been deposited into Government coffers, instead, ended up in the wallets and purses of officials salaried by the taxpayer to both safeguard our borders as well as collect revenue from human and cargo traffic.

The Atta-Mills government says that it intends to proscribe the practice and, perhaps, even prosecute some of the key players involved. Exactly how this will be effected is anybody’s good guess. But what can be exhorted at this juncture is that unless this serious act of official criminality is tabled on the summit agenda of ECOWAS leaders, it is almost certain that this problem will remain a perennially periodic propaganda prop.

*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 a Governing Board Member of the Accra-based Danquah Institute (DI) and the author of 21 books, including “Ghanaian Politics Today” (Atumpan Publications/Lulu.com, 2008). E-mail: okoampaahoofe@optimum.net.

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