President Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo must be firm and resolute in bringing down the deliberate lever of justice to bear on the heads and/or backs of those Mahama cabinet and deputy cabinet appointees who presently stand accused of having criminally and greedily drawn home double salaries during the time that they “served” as both executive operatives and Members of Parliament. He needs to, of course, listen to the representations and pleas of his ideological adversaries and political opponents, but he must always be mindful of those who worked tirelessly to make his Presidency rise above and well beyond the sort of pipe-dream cut out for him by both his most ardent internal detractors, in particular, and the latter’s chuckling and ever-winking collaborators across the political divide or chasm.
In the end, however, it is to his conscience and the dulcet and noble music of justice and the collective welfare of our nation upon which his final decision must be predicated. And his conscience, of course, also includes the input of the Independent Special Public Prosecutor, namely, Mr. Martin Amidu, whose present post inescapably constitutes the lynchpin and legacy of his administration. And then, of course, his Attorney-General and Minister of Justice, Ms. Gloria Akuffo, and the various national security agencies that fall under her purview. I strictly mean it, when I say that there must be absolutely No Adam-and-Eve Games here. For if anything at all, it was because of his widely perceived uncompromising stance and temperament, vis-à-vis the administration of justice, that curiously and ironically pushed some members and leaders of his own party, the New Patriotic Party (NPP), to forge an ungodly alliance against his long-held and nurtured presidential ambitions.
He also need not be perceived as vindictive, although he also ought not to be afraid of being tagged with all sorts of negative names and labels which, by the way, he has for quite a long while now become all-too-familiar with; for in the end, what is most significant to bear in mind is the lasting legacy that he leaves behind. At this juncture, though, I am much more curious to know why out of an initial 25 MPs and former Mahama cabinet and deputy cabinet appointees who were reportedly cited for criminal violations and asked to report to the police, a whopping 18 had their invitations withdrawn and only 7, we are told, are presently being criminally investigated for stealing the people’s money. My good guess here is that the figure of willful kleptocrats in the erstwhile Mahama cabinet far exceeds the initial 25 invited by the police, and that by the close of the investigations, we would have learned much more details about the thievish ways of other former executive appointees that we did not know before.
Now, this is what must happen very, very soon, if not immediately: one, those against whom overwhelming evidence of salary scamming has already been established, as of this writing, must be promptly expelled from Parliament. That would send a very strong message to all and sundry that it is well past midnight, and that the “slappocratic” days of the Woyome Games are well behind us. As already hinted at the beginning of this column, I also hope that President Akufo-Addo has been listening and paying studious attention to his own Independent Special Public Prosecutor say that his ability to conscientiously pursue the corrupt and criminally fraudulent in Ghanaian society, henceforth, will largely depend on how our President and his Government tackle the executive rot that clearly appears to have become the policy capstone of the erstwhile Mahama regime.
It is also inexcusably preposterous to hear the Parliamentary Minority Leader, Mr. Haruna Iddrisu, plead with President Akufo-Addo to promptly intervene in the latest scandal to rock the NDC side of the proverbial august House in order to “safeguard the integrity of Parliament.” I thought these were the words of either an irredeemably arrant fool or a professional comedian. First of all, the “integrity” of Parliament can only best be “safeguarded” or enhanced, if hopelessly rotten political apples like Mr. Iddrisu are immediately carted out and their fetid stench thoroughly washed off the floor of the august House. You see, about 10 years ago, I predicted in these very pages that unless shameless plagiarists like the Tamale-South’s NDC-MP were absolutely sequestered from the hallowed corridors of democratic power as far away as possible, Ghana very well and fast risked becoming the laughing stock of the rest of the world.
My call back then, came at about the same time that a Defense Minister in the government of Chancellor Angela Merkel was forced to resign for having plagiarized sizable chunks of his doctoral dissertation. In the equally damning case of Mr. Iddrisu, it was the latter’s Master of Sociology or Social Science Degree that was summarily withdrawn for the woeful lack of originality by the Academic Council of the University of Ghana. But, now, we are rather being told, in retrospect, and this did obliquely happen, by the way, that the direct intervention of then-President John Evans Atta-Mills, late, may very well have enhanced the integrity of this veritable clinical basket case of a parliamentary leader. And these are the same characters who would have Ghanaians believe that President Akufo-Addo and the Americans are in the ungodly business of selling our “Sovereignty.”
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