Take me on and leave AfricaWatch magazine alone – Ablakwa dares Presidency

Member of Parliament for North Tongu, Samuel Okudzeto Ablakwa has challenged the Presidency to take him on and leave the AfricaWatch magazine alone after the magazine’s latest publication on Ghana’s botched purchase of a Chancery in Norway.

The Presidency has described as “manufactured lies” the latest publication in the June 2019 edition of the AfricaWatch magazine titled “The inside story of the Oslo scandal: Conspiracy to steal”.

In a Press Statement signed by the Director of Communications at the seat of government, Eugene Arhin reacting to the Publication said: “We are aware of this magazine’s notoriously established agenda of defaming the President through the deliberate publication of such false stories about him. The agenda will fail, as it has failed before.”

Meanwhile, the government insists publishers, editors and distributors of the publication will be dealt with in the appropriate forum as the “contents of the publication impugn criminal conduct on the part of the President of the Republic, Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo, and the Minister for Foreign Affairs and Regional Integration, Hon. Shirley Ayorkor Botchway, MP.

But in an interview with Ejura based Naagyei FM, Hon. Okudzeto Ablakwa who in December 2018 first raised the issue in Parliament claiming that government had inflated the price of the building it intends to use as a Chancery in Norway by over $8 million said he is hugely shocked that the government has not said a word to him, but has rather directed its anger at AfricaWtach magazine.

“I’ve read the statement from the Presidency and I’m surprised that even though I first raised the matter in Parliament, the government is not rather taking me to court or dealing with me at the appropriate quarters to quote the statement from the Presidency but has decided to rather threatened Editor of the AfricaWatch Magazine. If you read the Africa Watch Magazine they’ve stated that they were trip to Norway to investigate the matter was triggered by my raising of the issue first and that what they’ve found is even damning than they thought. So I’m surprised that the government is not taking me on. “