I would not accuse him of corruption or being guilty of fraud or selective justice because, for the most part, I have absolutely no evidence to such effect. But, of course, it is quite well known that Mr. Anas Aremeyaw Anas, the renowned investigative journalist, and his Tiger-Eye PI team of private investigators did not work voluntarily or gratis, when the team collaborated with then-President John Dramani Mahama to supposedly root out corruption among members of the judiciary, several of whom lost their jobs and retirement entitlements and benefits. I understand that some of the judges “exposed” by the Anas team are still appealing their dismissals at the West African Court (of Human Rights?) or some such ECOWAS establishment in Nigeria. We are also told that some of the appellants have had the charges brought against them by the Wood-presided Ghana Judicial Council quashed.
Well, about my only accusation or, rather, impugnation of the investigative methodology by Tiger-Eye PI regards the abject failure or reluctance of the team to equally investigate the functionally foremost branch of our democratic governance, namely, the executive, and then the legislature many of whose elected members routinely double as cabinet appointees, irrespective of which of the country’s two major political parties controls Jubilee House or the erstwhile Flagstaff House. This query is significant because the Anas exposé on the judiciary, at least the formal release of the same, came on the heels of established incontrovertible evidence that, indeed, even as Vice-President to the late President John Evans Atta-Mills, Mr. Mahama was studiously engaged in the criminal habit of soliciting and receiving kickbacks from private contractors and entrepreneurs doing business with the government, and thus paid by the Ghanaian taxpayer.
If this is not a telling sign or evidence of the thorough-going corruption of Mr. Anas and his Tiger-Eye PI team, I don’t know what else it is. Now, it is not clear to me whether the ace private investigator cum professionally trained lawyer chose to collaborate in exposing rank corruption at the Nyantakyi-led Ghana Football Association (GFA) with journalists from the BBC and Al-Jazeera networks because he was fully convinced that the administration of soccer or football in Britain and the Arab Gulf States, unlike Ghana, was totally devoid of the sort of corruption scandal unearthed by Mr. Anas and his associates. He says he is not even a follower of Association Football, and so one can forgive him for being so naïve as to believe that the sort of corruption scandal unearthed at the GFA was unique to Ghanaian football administration. We must also question the legal basis under which the Tiger-Eye team decided to collaborate with operatives of the BBC and Al-Jazeera networks.
It is on the latter score that Ghanaian citizens and politicians like Mr. Kennedy Ohene Agyapong, also a media proprietor, have raised legitimate concerns. Now, Mr. Anas says that he had not anticipated that his exposé would effectively disrupt soccer administration in the country, and especially cause the virtual halt of the training program of Ghana’s Under-17 Women’s World Cup team. He says that the sole objective of his exposé was aimed at having the GFA’s proven subculture of rank corruption radically uprooted and the GFA establishment rendered completely wholesome within the next five years. But has our self-appointed “Watchman” considered the fact that most of the period during which this “subculture of corruption” festered under Mr. Kwasi Nyantakyi was smugly and cavalierly presided over by the Mills-Mahama-led regimes of the National Democratic Congress, whose own 3-Million-Dollar 2014 Brazil World Cup Scandal is still fresh in the minds of most avid soccer fans around the globe?
You see, there is a stark element of hypocrisy here that Mr. Anas and his brigade of powerful fans and patrons, among them elected policymakers and sponsors, need to promptly confront, if Ghana is not to indelibly establish itself as the epic joke of the soccer world.
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