Mubarak Muntaka is the Member of Parliament for Asawase in the Ashanti Region of Ghana
If I hadn’t studiously followed the mischievous leaking of a deliberately and viciously forged and altered copy of the budgetary requisition document presented to Parliament early this year by the Minister of Presidential Special Initiatives, Mrs. Hawa Koomson, as bitterly, angrily and emphatically attested by Mr. Osei Kyei Mensah-Bonsu, the Minister for Parliamentary Affairs who also doubles as the Parliamentary Minority Leader, I would easily have been taken in by the Parliamentary Minority Chief Whip’s expression of clearly staged outrage that President Addo DankwaAkufo-Addo would accuse some Parliamentary Minority operatives of having leaked copies of the Defense Cooperation Agreement between Ghana and the United States of America to our wolfish media (See “MPs Not Responsible for Leaking Ghana-US Military Document – Muntaka Mubarak” MyJoyOnline.com / Ghanaweb.com 4/6/18).
Not surprisingly, in his rather hollow and farcical response to President Akufo-Addo’s DCA-clarificatory national address, Mr. Mohammed Mubarak Muntaka, the NDC’s Member of Parliament for Kumasi-Asewase, in the Asante Region, disingenuously made it appear as if the Commander-in-Chief of the Ghana Armed Forces had made a blanket accusation of media leakage of the Defense Cooperation Agreement against all of the country’s parliamentarians.
In reality, we all heard Nana Akufo-Addo categorically state in his address to the nation on the ratification of the Enhanced Military and Security Cooperation Agreement (EMSCA) with the United States, that it was the “frontline” political operatives of the main opposition National Democratic Congress, and their splinter opposition political party allies, that caused a clearly unhidden and parliament-accessible document to be leaked to the press and mischievously and nefariously passed off as a “secret” agreement that had been signed between Ghana and the United States by President Akufo-Addo.
But what is wickedly ironic about this whole artificially cooked controversy surrounding EMSCA is the fact that, even as emphatically stated by the President in his national address of April 5, 2018, it was rather the leaders of the National Democratic Congress, namely, Messrs. Jerry John Rawlings and John Dramani Mahama, who had signed on the sly, or secretly, and unconstitutionally, three separate agreements on military cooperation with the United States, respectively, in 1998, 2000 and 2015.
This is very interesting because Chairman Rawlings, clearly one of the “unspeakable hypocrites” spoken about in President Akufo-Addo’s national address, who appears to have been pathologically addicted to signing military agreements with the United States, was also one of the very first critics to bitterly complain that the EMSCA pact was too intrusive and inordinately disruptive of the privacy and Sovereignty of ordinary Ghanaian citizens.
We also learn that it was, in fact, the same Chairman Jerry John Rawlings who, in 1989, or thereabouts, as Ghana’s self-righteous and all-knowing and all-powerful strongman, enacted the Small-Miners’ Act that precipitated the environmentally destructive Galamsey Industry that has rendered about 60-percent of the country’s waterbodies poisonous and undrinkable.
Indeed, it is a crying shame that the same politicians who smugly collaborated with Chairman Rawlings to literally lay Ghana’s human and natural resources to waste, and callously put the very lives of Ghanaian citizens on the verge of extinction, who are today shamelessly castigating President Akufo-Addo for democratically forwarding the DCA/EMSCA accord to Parliament for ratification.
That the National Democratic Congress’ Parliamentary Minority roundly boycotted the vote ratifying the 2008 Defense Cooperation Agreement with the United States, cannot erase the indelible fact that it was the same NDC operatives, suavely and shamelessly masked as key operatives of the erstwhile Provisional National Defense Council (PNDC), that gleefully, albeit nihilistically and unwisely, introduced the proverbial excavator-wielding Chinese Menace into the country.
These are the very originators and creators of the Galamsey Apocalypse who are now “unspeakably” pretending to be jealous defenders of Ghana’s Sovereignty. Nice try, Mr. Mubarak Muntaka. But, hell no, you can never fool bona fide Ghanaian citizens like yours truly any day and anywhere!