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On the run: Answer your own question, sucker!

Manasseh Azure Awuni3 Manasseh Azure

Sat, 10 Nov 2018 Source: Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., PhD

He was the one who so singularly and admirably exposed the seamy political underbelly of then-President John Dramani Mahama for the kleptocratic and pathological scam-artist that the former Atta-Mills’ arch-lieutenant had always been veritably known to be. I am here, of course, referring to the Ford Expedition Payola Affair, in which the then-Vice-President Mahama shamelessly extorted the aforementioned vehicular model from Mr. Djibril Kanazoe, the Burkinabe road and building contractor, in exchange for the awarding of a Ghana government construction contract. The shameless and unconscionable culprit would later claim that he was, after all, no buff or fan of American-made cars.

So one has every good reason to suppose that rather than so rudely and sarcastically demand to know whether President Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo has been drawing any payola benefits from the sanitation business of the Jospong Group of Companies, the parent company of Zoomlion, the largest garbage collection and treatment company in the country, that the young award-winning journalist could undertake some heavy-lifting sleuthing in order to be able to authoritatively tell the rest of us, the Ghanaian public, whether either Nana Akufo-Addo or his Administration has been unacceptably and/or criminally slow to act on purportedly incontrovertible evidence pointing to fraudulent fiscal dealings on the part of Zoomlion proprietor and Chief Executive Officer (CEO), to wit, Mr. Joseph Siaw Agyepong, because the award-winning Multimedia journalist’s arch-nemesis may have generously greased the palms of the Chief Resident of the Jubilee-Flagstaff House (See “Manasseh’s Folder: Does Akufo-Addo Benefit Directly from This Theft?” Modernghana.com 11/7/18). Would it really make any whit of a different if Nana Akufo-Addo were found to have “indirectly” benefited from the widely alleged corrupt activities of the Jospong Group?

Interestingly, the subject of this column appears to have all the facts and figures of the allegedly fraudulent appropriation by Mr. Siaw Agyepong of the Ghanaian taxpayer’s money for his own individual benefit at the expense of his “slavishly” exploited sanitation workers or employees at his fingertips. If our observation has critical validity, then what is preventing the Joy-FM Senior Correspondent or Reporter from archeologically and patriotically exposing President Akufo-Addo, instead of vacuously and defamatorily throwing tantrums and casting aspersions and innuendoes at the man who has, literally, been working around the clock these past two years to make Ghana much, much better than he was bequeathed by Mr. John “Kanazoe Payola” Mahama? Such dastardly mischief only points to the abject lack of credibility on the part of the accuser than the accused.

Needless to say, the figures in the afore-referenced prolix of an anti-Akufo-Addo tirade are predictably muddled, so I shall not waste any time attempting to debate or quibble with the same, except to also humbly ask the young award-winning Joy News’ Senior Writer and/or Super-Senior Correspondent, why he has been so deafeningly AWOL in the matter of Rev. Mensa Otabil’s cynical and blasphemous appropriation of the Bible in the scamming of hundreds of thousands of working-class Ghanaian citizens who so naively or unsuspectingly thought that they could grow their hard-earned money by investing the same in the banking institution allegedly owned and CEO’d by this unctuously pontifical man of the cloth. We think we know and have the answer; and it has everything to do with the fact of the Pontiff of the International Central Gospel Church’s having fully and generously footed the wedding party bill for the young award-winning journalist. If his brand and practice of journalism is not the identical-twin equivalent of the Mahama-Kanazoe Payola Scam-Artistry, I sincerely don’t know what else it is.

To tell the Dear Reader the unalloyed truth, about the only novel idiomatic expression that I learned – refreshingly – and stashed into my linguistic duffel trick bag of outrageous vocabulary while reading the article presently being discussed, was “to sought,” by which, of course, this genius of a “non-spectating” Ghanaian citizen meant “to seek.”

There were several other memorable lexical and grammatical slips in the article that exuded the unmistakable bite marks of a hate-filled crusader on a relentless mission of taking no prisoners, as it were, where the image, reputation and credibility of Messrs. Akufo-Addo and Siaw Agyepong were concerned.

*Visit my blog at: kwameokoampaahoofe.wordpress.com Ghanaffairs

Columnist: Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., PhD