Opinion: Probity and Accountability My Foot! – By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.

Brig.-Gen. Joseph Nunoo-Mensah

As a soldier, Brig.-Gen. Joseph Nunoo-Mensah is not very well known to have distinguished himself, in terms of helping with the institutional and professional maintenance of discipline in the Ghana Armed Forces. Like some of the shameless generals of his rank and higher, he would end up being led around and commanded by a half-Scottish and half-Anlo-Ewe urchin of a Flight-Lieutenant who clearly lacked the sort of enviably polished manners and deportment that come with having been raised in a responsible two-parent home. On the 70th birthday anniversary of the man who has done more than any other Ghanaian leader to systematically destroy the moral fabric of our nation, Brig.-Gen. Nunoo-Mensah was, once again, back on the airwaves rhetorically salivating over the purportedly sterling leadership qualities of Chairman Jerry John Rawlings (See “Rawlings, Nkrumah are Ghana’s Greatest Leaders – Nunoo-Mensah” MyJoyOnline.com / Modernghana.com 6/22/17).

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The man cuts a very pathetic figure; for his sole claim to any semblance of fame and dignity was his prompt resignation from the Rawlings-led junta of the Provisional National Defense Council (PNDC), in the wake of the abduction and summary execution of his retired soldier relative, Major Sam Acquah, the former Managing-Director, or Administrative Manager (I forget which), of the Ghana Industrial Holdings Corporation (GIHOC), together with the three Accra High Court Judges, namely, Justices Cecilia Koranteng-Addow, Kwadwo Agyei Agyepong and Fred Poku-Sarkodie, martyred for standing up for the very principles for which Chairman Rawlings claimed to have launched his so-called revolutionary interventions. The career coup-plotter-cum-strongman would vehemently denounce this at once barbaric and heinous crime of the highest order and emphatically deny that any operatives of his junta had been involved.

“It was the Enemies of the Revolution who carried out such a dastardly act,” he would scream in a voice so shrill it disturbingly lacked candor. And, of course, it would later turn out that Chairman Rawlings was the master of great mendacity. A blue-ribbon commission established to enquire into this patent case of systematically orchestrated assassination, called the Special Investigations Board, would issue what became known as the SIB Report, which put the blame for the murder of the three judges and the retired army major squarely at the feet of Chairman Jerry John Rawlings and his cousin and National Security Adviser, namely, Capt. Kojo Tsikata (Ret.)

Brig.-Gen. Nunoo-Mensah, ever the “booklong” soldier, appears to have been intimidated into deathly silence by these Trokosi Nationalist Revolutionaries, for he would decline to provide any logical reasons, publicly, for his resignation as an ex-officio cabinet member of the Provisional National Defense Council. He had not long before, been named Chief of the Defense Staff, if memory serves yours truly accurately. The Winneba native would briefly part ways with the Trokosi Nationalists and truck with the New Patriotic Party (NPP) on whose ticket he would run for parliament and lose very badly. Perhaps out of hunger or sheer cowardice, the armchair Brig.-Gen. would scurry back into the sinister fold of the Trokosi Nationalist Sponsors of State Terrorism.

Recently, Brig.-Gen. Nunoo-Mensah bitterly complained that he had petitioned President Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo for a salaried job on the National Security Council (NSC), but had been virulently rebuffed. He would accuse the former Attorney-General and Minister of Justice of running a non-inclusive government. Needless to say, no major political party in Ghana is more functionally vindictive and exclusivist than the Rawlings-founded National Democratic Congress. The man clearly has absolutely no credibility or any remarkable moral stature to talk about.

And so frankly, it is absolutely inconsequential which of our leaders Brig.-Gen. Nunoo-Mensah deems to be the greatest in Ghana’s postcolonial history.

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