By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.
Garden City, New York
August 23, 2014
E-mail: okoampaahoofe@optimum.net
It was not enough for the "low-Lifes" who run the Mahama-led government of the National Democratic Congress (NDC) that the drug arrest of Mr. Eric Amoateng at New York City's John F. Kennedy International Airport (JFK) had brought a lot of indescribable shame and embarrassment to Ghanaians at large. They had to further augment it with their world-renowned political criminality in order to bring it to a logical conclusion. And that distractive logical conclusion was to shamelessly advertise that, somehow, the esrtwhile Kufuor-led government of the New Patriotic Party (NPP) was to blame for the epidemic of drug-trafficking and the routine falsification of air-travel documents (See "Ghana's Mission in Washington Issued Amoateng's Fake Passport" MyJoyOnline.com / Ghanaweb.com 8/23/14).
Predictably, it did not matter a whit to these NDC scam-artists that the reputation of the former NPP-Member of Parliament (MP) for Nkoranza-North had been thoroughly damaged beyond repair; they had to also nail the coffin of this irreparably humiliated man by ruthlessly sinking him sex feet under. And with the latter so amateurishly and crudely effected, they hoped to gain a remarkable electioneering campaign traction and edge over their most formidable opponents of the New Patriotic Party.
The timing also seemed just perfect, coming as it did on the heels of the running scandals that have become the staple diet of the grossly incompetent and thoroughgoing corrupt Mahama/Amissah-Arthur administration. Nice try, as New Yorkers are wont to say, but fat chance! Fat chance because now the law of the proverbial boomerang has ensured that the joke would be on the trap-setters. Now, the NDC operatives are intensely involved in a lurid game of finger-pointing and musical chairs in a preposterous attempt to finding a scapegoat for their collective mischief.
It shouldn't surprise anybody if it turns out that the fake Amoateng passport scam was actually conceived and executed by some of the highest placed officials in the Mahama government. Mr. Akrasi Sarpong, the Executive Director of the Narcotic Control Board of Ghana (NACOB), has some serious explaining to do, since he was the frontline actor who caused Mr. Amoateng to be taken into BNI custody shortly after the plane carrying the recently released ex-convict touched down at the Kotoka International Airport (KIA).
The initial pretext given the public by the NACOB chief was one of protocol; and at the time, it seemed perfectly in order - and then the Mahama posse sprang this passport scam accusation on Mr. Amoateng. Many of us had even been made to believe that the alleged fake Amoateng passport had been a part of his alleged act of criminality at the time of his arrest at New York City's JFK. Now it turns out that somebody in the pay of President Mahama had been up to some grievous mischief. And I wouldn't be the least bit surprised if it also turns out that the man recently picked up by the Bureau of National Investigations for questioning in the wake of the Amoateng scam, Mr. Odoi Anim, was so invited by the BNI operatives primarily because Mr. Anim served as Director of Passports under President John Agyekum-Kufuor.
And true to our prediction, it turns out that Mr. Anim had been nowhere near the Passport Office in 2009, when Mr. Amoateng was issued the passport in contention. He had been Ghana's Deputy Ambassador to the Netherlands. He would return to Ghana in 2011, when the reins of governance were effectively in the hands of Messrs. Atta-Mills and Dramani Mahama. In fact, Mr. Anim would not be named Director of Passports until July 2012, about the time of the "mysterious" passing of then-President John Evans Atta-Mills and the "divinely sagacious" swearing in of Mr. John Dramani Mahama.
Now, what is even more fascinating, according to Mr. Odoi Anim, who no longer serves as Director of Passports, is that at the time of his release and repatriation/deportation order, Mr. Amoateng ought to have arrived in Ghana on a Laissez-Passer or an emergency "Free Pass" travel document (very likely one that would have been issued by the US-CIS or the United States' Citizenship and Immigration Service) and not on a regular Ghanaian passport.
In other words, somebody in Ghana's Consulate in Washington, DC - or the District of Columbia, not the State of Columbia, as MyJoyOnline.com erroneously reported it - issued Mr. Amoateng the alleged travel travel passport which, allegedly, contained the identity and vital statistics of a woman. Mr. Odoi Anim is no longer Director of Passports, and so whoever President Mahama named in place of Mr. Anim has to tell the Ghanaian public, and the world at large, precisely who sprang such a criminal act of double-jeopardy on Mr. Amoateng.
I am raptly waiting to hear what Mr. Osei Kyei Mensah-Bonsu, the New Patriotic Party's Parliamentary Minority Leader, has to say about this gravely disturbing matter.
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