By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.
Garden City, New York
Dec. 1, 2015
E-mail: [email protected]
I am quite certain that if the pontifical and self-righteous operatives of the theft-prone National Democratic Congress (NDC) had thought carefully through their decision to victimize and vilify the New Patriotic Party’s Member of Parliament for Adansi-Asokwa, they would have let the proverbial sleeping dogs lie. In other words, they would not have attempted to so brashly and foolishly, and scandalously, touch Mr. Kobina Tahir Hammond with the metaphorical 40-foot pole. Indeed, when news of the intended investigation of the former Deputy Energy Minister first hit the headlines, I was tempted, as a gut reaction, to reach for my pen. And then what Freudian psychologists call the “superego” counseled me to wait a while, until enough details had been made available by the very people who clearly intended to make mincemeat of Mr. Hammond. I had expected anything but the outrageous revelation that Mr. Tsatsu Tsikata, one of the widely alleged masterminds behind the primitive abduction and savage assassination of the three Akan-descended Accra High Court judges and the retired Ghana Army major, and his wife, Ms. Esther Cobbah, had been paid nearly GHC 2 million in gratuities at the couple’s parting of the ways with the Ghana National Petroleum Corporation (GNPC).
We must also quickly note that two former officials have also been named in what appears to be a statutory heist, namely, Nana Boakye Asafu-Adjaye, described as a retired Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of the GNPC, and a former Field Evaluation and Development Manager of the same establishment by the name of Mr. Dagadu. Well, I have always known Mr. Tsikata, a former untenured law lecturer at the University of Ghana, to be a pathological kleptocrat or common thief. And I have not hesitated to call him out on the same in the recent past when I deemed it necessary to do so, primarily for the benefit of Ghanaian citizens too young to either remember or to have come into a full and reliable knowledge of the savagely brutal and bloody political history of that period of postcolonial Ghana of which the former GNPC’s CEO was a key player (See “GNPC Payments to Tsatsu Tsikata and Co.: Was it Ex-Gratia or ESB?” MyJoyOnline.com / Ghanaweb.com 12/1/15).
Anyway, Mr. Hammond, the former Kufuor deputy cabinet appointee, who has come under a garish radar of scrutiny in recent weeks by some Flagstaff House operatives, has said that Mr. Tsikata never specifically asked for the alleged “ex-gratia” sum of GHC 1 million, at least not while the Kufuor-led New Patriotic Party (NPP) government held the fort. Nevertheless, as Americans are fond of saying, there is an uncomfortably thin line between asking for and receiving. In other words, consenting to receiving what has been characterized by some members of the Ghanaian media as an “ex-gratia” award, when the legally trained Mr. Tsikata knew fully well that such an award had not been clearly spelt out in his contractual terms of reference, does not make this act any less criminally felonious. It is strikingly akin to one’s being criminally charged with having been the recipient of stolen goods. And even as Mr. Dennis Agyei Dwomoh, the renowned lawyer, aptly put it the other day, the Ghana National Petroleum Corporation was created by a statutory act enshrined in the country’s 1992 Fourth-Republican Constitution.
What the preceding means is that whatever financial payments were made to Mr. Tsikata, vis-à-vis his status as an executive employee of the GNPC, ought to have been clearly spelt out in the contractual document issued him by then-President Jerry John Rawlings, the Life-Patron of the Congress of Trokosi Nationalists. If the payment in question was not specifically stated in Mr. Tsikata’s contract as CEO of the GNPC, then one could safely conclude that the said amount of purported “ex-gratia” payment can incontrovertibly be characterized as stolen money. In sum, the aforesaid amounts of money that were paid to the four former GNPC employees named in the news report ought to be promptly returned to where they belong – our public coffers. Very likely, the payments allegedly made to the Tsikata Gang were doled out, out of the unspoken fear of the dire consequences down the pike for the current GNPC managerial staff.
What is also quite fascinating about the entire scam is the fact that some of these “ex-gratia” payments are reported to have been made to GNPC employees who had merely been transferred from one department of the same corporation to another, rather than their being severance payments. Well, knowing what most of us know so far about the Woyomo Heist, it well appears that Chairman Rawlings has inoculated the Trokosi Nationalists against the legal reach of social justice. In other words, there clearly exist two separate laws in Ghana, namely, Trokosi Law, specially crafted to protect Trokosi bastards like Messrs. Alfred Agbesi Woyome and Tstatsu Tsikata; and another, of course, for those of us “Wretched of the Earth” (my profuse apologies to Dr. Frantz Fanon).