By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.
Garden City, New York
Nov. 27, 2015
E-mail: [email protected]
Ever since he was posted to Ghana from South America, I believe from Chile or Argentina, from whence his wife also hails, Mr. Jon Benjamin has not ceased reminding Ghanaians about what we needed to have always been aware of and positively done something about, if Ghanaian society was to radically improve and join the respectable ranks of the most civilized and advanced democracies. It is, of course, the carcinogenic culture of bribery and corruption which well appears to have become part and parcel of the political fabric of Ghanaian society. Mr. Benjamin, Britain’s High Commissioner to Ghana, is no fleering hypocrite. He is pragmatic and responsible enough to admit the unsavory existence of the twin-practice of bribery and corruption even in his own country.
What is remarkable about the man, however, is the fact that Mr. Benjamin is also savvy enough to acknowledge that while these twin banes of social justice exists in every society and country in the world, nevertheless, what matters most is the role that law-enforcement agencies and the judiciary have in extirpating the same (See “My View on Corruption in Ghana has not Changed – Jon Benjamin” MyJoyOnline.com / Ghanaweb.com 11/27/15). Indeed, I predicted not quite a while ago that Mr. Benjamin is apt to succeed to the prime ministerialship of his country in due course. He is presently engaged in the sort of yeomanly service that Ghanaian leaders like the pontifical and self-righteous Chairman Jerry John Rawlings, and the largely smug and complacent President John Agyekum-Kufuor, have woefully failed to do. For Mr. Kufuor, the immediate-past leader of the New Patriotic Party (NPP) and two-term President of Fourth-Republican Ghana, “Corruption is as old as Adam and Eve.”
We must, however, fairly and quickly add that Mr. Kufuor, as Ghana’s Commander-in-Chief, had also claimed to have been willing to have any of his cabinet appointees brought up on charges of corruption promptly investigated and prosecuted, except that he, personally, did not seem to have been very enthusiastic in leading the charge. When the President himself was publicly brought up on charges of having converted his Osu-Castle office into a veritable receptacle for “bribes in sealed envelopes,” his first order of response was to have the man who made the charge, Mr. Harouna Esseku, then-National Chairman of the New Patriotic Party, promptly suspended, even as Mr. Kufuor’s wily Chief-of-Staff, Mr. Kwadwo Mpiani, vehemently denied the charges. Of course, the more politically accountable tack, or approach, would have been for President Kufuor to have called on Parliament to empower a Special Independent Prosecutor to look into the matter.
Still, it is probably very accurate to observe that it was the self-proclaimed revolutionary Chairman Jerry John Rawlings who actually institutionalized the regime and level of official corruption being currently experienced in the country. And all this, after savagely and summarily executing several former military rulers for simply taking out housing loans from Ghanaian banks, and not for directly stealing the people’s money, which is precisely what the Mahama-led government of the National Democratic Congress, of which Chairman Rawlings is the founding patriarch, has been widely alleged to be mired up to its neck in. And here also ought to be promptly underscored the fact that it was during the tenure of Mr. Rawlings that state-owned houses were unconscionably quartered up and sold, at giveaway prices, to cabinet appointees and cronies.
Ironically and quizzically, however, when the then-outgoing government of President Kufuor decided to continue with this practice, there was a great hue-and-cry from among the top-echelon membership of the then-opposition National Democratic Congress. The newly elected NDC government of President John Evans Atta-Mills, late, would staunchly and shamelessly back two junior cabinet appointees, namely, Messrs. Edward Omane-Boamah and Samuel Okudzeto-Ablakwa, to vigorously launch and pursue a lawsuit against Mr. Jake Obetsebi-Lamptey, then-National Chairman of the New Patriotic Party.
In its quite edifying ruling on Okudzeto-Ablakwa and Omane-Boamah vs. Obetsebi-Lamptey, the Supreme Court of Ghana indicated that while the routine quartering up of public property, and the flea-market sale of the same to public officials, was inextricably illegal and immoral, nevertheless, it was the Chairman Rawlings-led regime of the National Democratic Congress that had normalized such a patently corrupt practice. What is very fascinating to point out here is the flat refusal of the plaintiffs, to wit, Messrs. Omane-Boamah and Okudzeto-Ablakwa, to promptly abide by the Wood Supreme Court’s ruling by immediately releasing Mr. Obetsebi-Lamptey’s illegally expropriated real-estate property. These two wet-eared men would continue to thumb their noses at the Supreme Court, with the brazen backing of President Mills, until faced with a moral dilemma, or contradiction, they decided to relent. Today, these two scofflaws are members of the Mahama cabinet. Dr. Omane-Boamah is the substantive Communications Minister, while Mr. Okudzeto-Ablakwa is Deputy Education Minister.
Needless to say, I am as scandalized as High Commissioner Benjamin on the “soli”-tempered practice of Ghanaian journalism; perhaps even more so because I was born and raised in Ghana, in addition to having been academically and professionally trained as a journalist at the City College of the City University of New York (CCNY of CUNY), the same great institution that educated the legendary Rosenthal Brothers of New York Times fame, Dr. Seus, the globally immortalized physician and children’s literature author, as well as Dr. Jonas Salk, the developer / inventor of the polio vaccine. Indeed, most of his critics may not recognize this, but Mr. Benjamin is doing the sort of intellectual and cultural heavy-lifting that Ghanaian scholars and intellectuals at such flagship academies as the University of Ghana and the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology have been doing largely at a miserly level.
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