BIG BROTHER NANA AKUFO-ADDO: USING AIRBUS POLITICS TO AVOID OWN GARGANTUAN CORRUPTION
BIG BROTHER NANA AKUFO-ADDO MUST STOP THE POLITICS OF THE AIRBUS SE-GHANA BRIBERY AND CONFRONT HEADLONG THE NAUSEATING CORRUPTION IN HIS GOVERNMENT.
BY MARTIN A. B. K. AMIDU
The Ministry of National Security is now the Ministry of Truth in which We the People of Ghana must have unquestioned faith for our existence as a nation since 6 March 1957 and whose words and wisdom on state security as determined by BIG BROTHER Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo’s saviour Government every Ghanaian must without further questioning and reasoning take for Bible and gospel or risk blasphemy or heresy.
Our Saviour, His Excellency Highness President Big Brother, Nana Akufo-Addo (B.B.), in his infinite wisdom and omnipotence after creating a national security situation of instigating members of his Government to picket the offices of his immediate predecessor, decided on 21 November 2023 to show mercy, benevolence, and to save We the People, his creation, from impending calamity from the picketing by his attack dogs. Big Brother had caused his quasi-government movement of attack dogs to disturb the peace of We the People after his Ghana Bar Association diatribes on 11 September 2023 leading, four days thereafter, to the 15 September 2023 rehearsed petition to Big Brother’s Agyapa Special Prosecutor of the Office of the Special Prosecutor.
By his infinite wisdom, omnipotence and mercy, Big Brother, instructed his Ministry of Truth to agree with the leadership of his Government’s attack dogs, the entity called the Fixing the Country Movement to call off its demonstration finally planned for 23 November 2023 on grounds of threats it posed to the security of the State.
The Republic of Ghana under the 1992 Constitution on 7 January 2017 became the patrimony of Our Saviour, His Excellency Highness President Big Brother (B.B.) Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo to manipulate and dispense with regarding what the electorate must believe and disbelieve as ordained by him, and his family and friends’ Government. The 2024 elections must bend to the dictates and wishes of Big Brother in the use of orchestrated political truth deployed by all levers of state power under his control to discredit his opponents to ensure his self-perpetuation in the surrogacy of a successor at the 7 December 2024 election and on 7 January 2025.
Consequently, on 4 July 2023 the Agyapa Special Prosecutor of the Office of the Special Prosecutor (OSP) indicated an intention to revive and give life to the dormant chicken feed Airbus SE-Ghana investigation, without mentioning the outstanding Gargantuan formal investigations into the numerous findings of suspicion disclosed by the Anti-corruption Risk Assessment Report into the Agyapa Royalties Transactions which had been pending in the OSP since 15 October 2020. As part of Big Brother’s vision and first step in resurrecting the Airbus SE-Ghana comatose investigation, the Agyapa Special Prosecutor fed the rented press with his engagement with the FBI, the UK Serious Fraud office, and INTERPOL on the investigation to politicize and give misinformed currency to prospects of ever concluding the investigation within the 2024 election cycle. One could see through the lies and machinations of the Agyapa Special Prosecutor and Big Brother, but how dare reasonable citizens to articulate them without the Ministry of Truth coming after them.
My suspicions about the in tandem orchestration and politicization of the Airbus SE-Ghana investigation were first confirmed on 13 August 2023 at 19:21 Hours when I received a missed call from an unlikely source and returned the call at 19:41 Hours only to hear my interlocutor say from the other end that: “Uncle it is me…..”. My interlocutor wanted to find out from me whether I could confirm that Samuel Mahama, the younger brother of former President John Mahama, and other suspects for whom I had caused an INTERPOL arrest warrant to issue when I was the Special Prosecutor, had been arrested in the United Kingdom for extradition to Ghana. My interlocutor turned out to be a public officer in the Government paid from public funds appropriated by parliament who in his official capacity has nothing to do with law enforcement in Ghana. Incidentally, he also holds an influential position in the New Patriotic Party (NPP).
I answered in the negative and reminded my interlocutor that I ceased to have anything to do with the Airbus SE-Ghana investigation upon my resignation from the OSP. I, therefore, had no interest whatsoever in following what was happening in that investigation. I also reminded the interlocutor that I had left the OSP in the care of my deputy as the acting Special Prosecutor for eleven months before a substantive Special Prosecutor was appointed on 5 August 2021. I asked the interlocutor to contact Kissi Agyebeng, the Special Prosecutor to confirm whether or not the allegations he sought to confirm from me were true. We spoke on the phone for 5 minutes 35 seconds at my expense.
But I continued to wonder the purpose of reaching out to me when I had made it clear to the whole world that the Airbus SE-Ghana investigation was nothing compared to the sinking fund and annuity Big Brother and his family and friends’ Government created in the Agyapa Royalties Transactions for which reason I resigned my office as the first Special Prosecutor on grounds of interference by Big Brother in the impending formal investigations.
Then, as if by some coincidence, on 11 September 2023 His Excellency Highness President of Ghana, Nana Akufo-Addo (B.B.), was reported to have referred to a statement purportedly made by me as the first Special Prosecutor in respect of the then on-going investigations into the Airbus SE-Ghana corruption allegations to insinuate disingenuously that his predecessor, John Dramani Mahama had committed a corruption offence for which reason “right-thinking citizens should ensure the defeat in 2024 of the man….” The context of the President’s conclusions defied logic and commonsense but being an omnipotent demi-god it came handy for a populist politician intent on whipping animosity against a political rival. Omnipotent Nana Addo (B.B.) said:
“Not only are these concepts of “NPP” and “NDC” judges new in our public discourse, but they are also extremely dangerous, and represent the most brazen attack on the independence of the judiciary by any allegedly responsible politician of the 4th Republic. They provide another reason, if more were needed, why right-thinking citizens should ensure the defeat in 2024 of the man whom the first Special Prosecutor identified as Government Official No.1, in the still unresolved Airbus Bribery Scandal.”
When I read the President’s rhetorical diatribes I had no doubt that the OSP included the Airbus SE-Ghana comatose and dormant investigation in its half-yearly cases pending for investigations and suppressed the corruption disclosures in the main Agyapa Royalties Risk of Corruption and Anti-corruption Risk Assessment Report dated 15 October 2020 for purely political electoral purposes to facilitate the NPP campaign in the 2024 elections. In today’s Ghana, Big Brother equates the electorate who trusted and voted for him to be President with a pack of rabbles who he expects as yokels to trust mere observations made by the first Special Prosecutor in the main Agyapa Royalties Transactions Report identifying somebody as Government Official No. 1.
Big Brother by the same parity of reasoning expected the same rabbles and yokels constituting the electorate to ignore the definite damning disclosures in the main and substantive Agyapa Royalties Risk of Corruption and Anti-Corruption Risk Assessment Report written by the same first Special Prosecutor as tainted with Gargantuan suspected procurement malpractices and corruption for the self-enrichment of his Government of implicated cousins and other family members and friends.
In accordance with Big Brother’s script and pre-arrangement, on 15 September 2023, four days after His Excellency Saviour B. B. Nana Akufo-Addo’s Ghana Bar Association purely partisan and substantively rhetorical and populist delivery, I read a petition addressed to the Agyapa Special Prosecutor, Kissi Agyebeng, with the title “PETITION: Request For Action On The Airbus Corruption” and signed by a Deputy Director for Communications, NPP (New Patriotic Party). This petition was followed on 24 September 2023 with a statement titled: “Notice to occupy Mahama's office in 14 days on the Mahama Airbus Corruption”, signed by Ernest Kofi Owusu-Bempah Bonsu (Convener - Fixing the Country Movement) giving the Agyapa Special Prosecutor an ultimatum to conclude the Airbus SE-Ghana investigations failing which the picketing was not to take place at the OSP for failing to address the petition, but at Mahama’s office.
Big Brother’s Government surrogate entity, Fixing the Country Movement, run by a Deputy Director for Communications of the NPP, gave notice to the Ghana Police Service of its intention to picket at the office of former President John Mahama on 16 October 2023. The Government sponsored movement rescheduled the picketing to Thursday, 16 November 2023, and again to Thursday 23 November 2023. In the interim the National Democratic Congress (NDC) had also scheduled and rescheduled a clean up exercise at former President Mahama’s office on the same days and times and rescheduled the clean up exercise on each occasion that the Government movement rescheduled its picketing at the same venue.
I was amazed to hear that the Ghana Police Service had granted the government sponsored movement a permit to picket at the office of Big Brother’s predecessor. How could the Ghana Police Service under the 1992 Constitution grant a permit to anybody to picket at the office or premises of a person who has not even been invited on suspicion of the suspected commission of any corruption or corruption-related offence in relation to the comatose Airbus SE-Ghana investigations at the OSP for upwards of three years? What had happened to the constitutional presumption of innocence and the burden of proof cast upon the Republic of Ghana in investigations and prosecutions of crime under the 1992 Constitution? I convinced myself that it might all be part of the politics of diversion of public attention from the biting economic deprivation wrought upon the nation by the incompetence and cluelessness of Big Brother and his inept Government.
Then again, in the evening of Sunday 19 November 2023 at 17:29 Hours I received a telephone call from my interlocutor of 13 August 2023 informing me that they intended to picket at John Mahama’s office. I asked my interlocutor why his office when he is presumed innocent, and not rather at the OSP which has the responsibility to investigate the case and has not even invited him in relation to the case? My interlocutor apparently wanted me to confirm that there was sufficient evidence to connect the former President to the Airbus SE-Ghana corruption investigations. He told me that I had postponed the investigations until after the 2020 elections because I did not want to be seen interfering in the elections and I had also identified the former President as Government Officer 1.
I told my interlocutor that I had not interrogated the former President at the time I postponed the investigation because the Government had failed to assist the OSP to procure the recording of the interview the former President gave to the Graphic reporter on the Airbus SE-Ghana case even though I had asked the Government and the Minister of Information for the audio recording. I explained that I was not sure the Government itself wanted the matter investigated apart from using the investigations to discredit its opponent and achieve political point scoring. (As an aside, there is a brilliant young lawyer who knows from conversations at 10:12 Hours and 22:15 Hours between us that it has been my thinking since Monday, 3 February 2019 on this matter that the OSP was being perniciously used for election politics). I told my interlocutor that the Ministry of Defence which handled the procurement of the Airbus SE aircraft could not make useable and relevant records of the negotiations on the transaction available to the OSP or allow the OSP for obvious security reasons to access the relevant computer and internet accounts of those who handled the transaction to search for email exchanges on the procurement despite request for information and documents. I told my interlocutor also that President Nana Addo and the late Victor Newman, the Director of Research at the Presidency, were sufficiently briefed about these request by the OSP.
I informed my interlocutor that the only person who could speak to the status of the case was the Special Prosecutor. I explained to him that the Special Prosecutor may be facing his own challenges and would be the better person to explain them to him. I explained further that I did not think it was lawful to go picketing a person who has never been invited for investigations or formally informed that he was the subject of any suspected commission of crime. I asked my interlocutor whether he thought it would be right to picket at the premises of every person suspected of the commission of crime. I asked further what he thought would happen should the other side also decide to picket, for instance, at Cecilia Dapaah’s residence? I stated further that the Airbus-Ghana investigation was a purely criminal investigation and not an enterprise in politics. I stated also that I thought Kwaku Baako had explained sufficiently the irrationality of picketing at the offices of a suspect to put the picketing at the former President’s office to rest. I told him I did not think that picketing prospective suspects was lawful and the proper thing to do. My interlocutor insisted that they were going to picket first at the OSP and go from there to the former President’s office. He told me that they intended to go on with the picketing but will call me again should the need arise. We spoke for 10 minutes 44 seconds this time round.
Throughout the conversation, I was not oblivious of the possibility of the telephone interaction with my interlocutor being recorded or being available on the provider’s network should the government wish to use it for any nefarious purposes. I was waiting to see whether the Government movement’s picketing would come on as promised in the telephone interaction with me in the evening of Sunday, 19 November 2023 or be postponed from 23 November 2023 as usual to another future date to sustain Big Brother’s propaganda machinery of using the comatose Airbus SE-Ghana investigation for political electioneering towards the 2024 elections.
On 21 November 2023 I read the stunt pulled by Big Brother using his Ministry of Truth under Albert Kan-Dapaah. The Government thought it had pulled another strong deception on the Ghanaian electorate when its Ministry of National Security under Albert Kan-Dapaah (which is called in Big Brother’s newspeak, the Ministry of Truth, on account of its specialization in fake news and misinformation of the electorate for electioneering purposes) caused the public to be misinformed that it had agreed with the leadership of the Fixing the Country Movement to call off its planned demonstration planned for 23 November 2023 at the office of the former President and nemesis of Big Brother on grounds of threats it posed to the security of the State. (The Fixing the Country Movement will later state in a press statement that it had been ordered to call the picketing off by the Ministry of Truth).
The snag in this magnanimous decision and feat achieved by the Big Brother Government misinformation is that the foolish electorate of Ghana is as usual unable to see through the fact that the Fixing the Country Movement and the Nana Akufo-Addo Government of Ghana are one and the same entity run by a leadership paid from the public purse as a public officer.
A Government surrogate movement gathers capital since 15 September 2023 on grounds of picketing at the office of a former President for no indictable crime by any law enforcement agency; the surrogate government movement is granted a permit by Big Brother’s controlled Inspector-General of Police and Ghana Police Service to unlawfully picket at the office; the picketing is postponed several times; and when the final day is about to arrive, Big Brother’s Government’s Ministry of Truth which he has used as an octopus spreading its tentacles over all ministerial subject matters, orchestrates a negotiation with the Government’s own movement run by public officers paid from the public purse to call off the alleged planned demonstration for 23 November 2023.
One media house, Ghana Web, was unconsciously or consciously used as a ruse when it was led into reporting that: “The National Security Ministry, according to reliable sources, saw the planned picketing as setting a dangerous precedent for protests being organized at private offices of individuals even if they are seeking public office.”
This political gimmick of demonstration and picketing at the former President’s office had been on-going since the Big Brother President Nana Akufo-Addo’s Ghana Bar Association signal on 11 September 2023 to the surrogate government movement to politicize the Airbus SE-Ghana investigation, through statements by the movement on 15 September 2023, 16 October 2023, and 16 November 2023. So, when did the danger become apparent to the Ministry of Truth and not the Ghana Police Service who permitted the demonstration and picketing in the first place? And where was the Minister of the Interior for the octopus Ministry of National Security, known in newspeak as the Ministry of Truth to unearth this danger?
But the President’s cousin, Gabby Otchere-Darko recruited the media by posting on X to enable him to play the lizard who fell from the tall iroko tree in Achebe’s Things Fall Apart and to commend the Minister of Truth for the Ministry’s communist inferior tactics in ordering his government’s own movement it instructed to picket at John Mahama’s office in the first place to pull back, and then to hoodwink Ghanaians. In the process he is also baiting us to talk about the glaring unconstitutional tribal conflict of interest and side taking in one of the Minister of Truth’s exercise of discretion in one of commended cases.
On 22 November 2023 I read a statement online of even date on the “Suspension of Airbus Demonstration”, the first paragraph of which stated that: “The Fixing the Country Movement wishes to inform the general public that due to a formal order by the Ministry of National Security, the planned demonstration and picketing at the Cantonments office of former President John Mahama for Thursday November 23, 2023, has been called off.” (Emphasis supplied). The statement was signed by Ernest Kofi Owusu-Bempah Bonsu, Convener.
I still waited for the demonstration and picketing at the OSP which is the law enforcement agency which initiated the whole political electioneering process with the Airbus SE-Ghana comatose investigation by its half-yearly publication on 4 July 2023 and deliberately left out the intended investigations arising out of the main Agyapa Royalties Anti-Corruption Risk Assessment Report. 23 November 2023 came to pass without any picketing at the OSP.
When I had completed the first draft of this discourse on 26 November 2023, I received a telephone call at 21:48 Hours from Kumasi calling my attention to a news report on television stating that the Big Brother President had said at Sunday church service that under his watch, no person or group will be allowed to destabilize the peace of the country. Whatever Big Brother said did not appear online when I did searches online that night.
I found an online reportage of what the President said as part of his aaddress at the Victory Congregation of the Presbyterian Church of Ghana at Adentan Frafraha, Accra, on Sunday 26 November 2023 during the valedictory church service for the outgoing Moderator of the Presbyterian Church, Rt. Reverend Professor Joseph Obiri Yeboah Mante on Citi Newsroom on the morning of 27 November 2023. President Akufo-Addo “strongly condemned the actions of certain National Democratic Congress (NDC) members who were captured in viral videos wielding machetes around the office premises of the party’s flagbearer, John Dramani Mahama, following a purported cleanup (sic) exercise on Thursday, 23 November 2023.,” was the news report.
One would have thought that Big Brother’s Ministry of Truth would have ordered the suspension of the clean up campaign at the office of the former President which had been announced and rescheduled as his government’s movement’s demonstration and picketing at the same office kept on being rescheduled until ordered not to take place upon his instructions to the Minister for Truth. Unless one is born with a golden spoon in one’s mouth like Big Brother, and has not, therefore, known what it means to engage in clean up in and/or around premises in Ghana, the ordinary Ghanaian knows that to weed and clean in and/or around bushy premises involves using machetes and cutlasses.
Big Brother was cowardly enough not to use his Ministry of Truth to order the NDC cleaners not to clean and weed around their Castle, so he decides to use the solemn occasion of the valedictory ceremony of an ardent supporter for political electioneering for his long game to favour his chosen and anointed successor at the 2024 elections. Big Brother, Nana Akufo-Addo is reported to have said inter alia, that:
“It is my honest hope that the machetes and weapons brandished last week at the residence of the NDC’s presidential candidate, the former president John Mahama are not signs of things to come in the run-up of the 2024 elections. If it is, I can assure them that they will find no success with them. I want to state for the record that under my watch, no person or group of persons no matter their political colouration will destabilise our country nor destroy the peace that all of us are enjoying. It will not happen.”
The foregoing indiscrete statement in a Presbyterian Church of all places, lends credence to Prof. Steve Hanke’s assessment of Big Brother President Akufo-Addo when the former posted on X that: “♯SaveGhanaNow: Ghana’s Pres. Akufo-Addo is at it again. He is lighting one fire after another.”
The Ghanaians electorate has been so disappointed and brutalized physically, mentally, socially, politically, economically, and financially that Big Brother’s threats mean nothing to the starving and dying horse, if the only way to survive is to kick for change for fresh air to keep body and soul together from the masterclass of economic mess citizens find themselves in as a result of the incompetent management of the country by this President.
I find it objectionable as a reasonable being that the person the electorate entrusted with their votes to keep them safe is the very President abusing his constitutional oath and on the least opportunity politicizing every official government ceremony to which he is invited as President of Ghana for political electioneering to intimidate opponents to facilitate the rigging of the 2024 Presidential elections for his anointed surrogate to enable Big Brother to unofficially have a third term in office. Instead of taking personal responsibility for creating the tense security situation in Ghana with his Fixing the Country Movement to which the NDC cleaners were responding to, Big Brother has a sense of entitlement to the right to disingenuously shift the blame unto his opponents using the run-up to the 2024 elections as a cover-up.
Anybody acquainted with the interdisciplinary scholarship, experience and practice of conflict, security and intelligence studies and research knows that both in the domestic and international politics and relationship there is no weak person in conflict, whether productive or destructive conflict. Common sense and experiential learning will teach anybody wishing to learn why the mighty United States of America lost the peace in Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, and in almost every modern war in which it has been engaged in in spite of its powerful military machine.
In municipal African politics it serves one to remember what the late President Thomas Sankara told then Chairman Jerry John Rawlings and the Ghana delegation on 3 September 1983 when the latter visited Po in Burkina Faso for the first Ghana-Burkina Faso meeting after the 4 August 1983 Revolution in Upper Volta – “a soldier is a civilian in uniform”. (I was temporarily the Acting PNDC Secretary in charge of the Upper East Region at the time in the absence of the late John Akparibo Ndebugri who was on admission at the 37 Military Hospital, Accra and, therefore, the host of the Ghana delegation when they arrived at Paga airstrip on the Ghana side). Every law enforcement officer by parity of reasoning is a civilian in uniform and there is a threshold beyond which no politician ought to delude himself from being capable of using them against fellow citizens in breach of national Constitutions. History does not repeat itself, they say, but it rhymes.
The 1992 Constitution does not empower Big Brother President Nana Akufo-Addo to insist upon an investigation into a paltry 4 million Euros alleged Airbus SE-Ghana suspected corruption when he has pushed under the carpet the Gargantuan Agyapa Royalties Transactions procurement malpractices and corruption detailed in a 64-page report. Two examples from the Agyapa Royalties Report may suffice to make the point of the magnitude of the procurement malpractices for the benefit of two cousins of President Akufo-Addo discovered by the Anti-corruption Risk Assessment Report.
First, the Agyapa Royalties Report assessed the Mandate Agreement of the Agyapa Transactions that benefited Imara Corporate Finance (Pty.) of South/Data Financial Service Limited, a surrogate of the Ghana Ministry of Finance or in newspeak the Ghana Ministry of Plenty at a first success fee of over US$4, 000,000.00 to have been tainted by bid rigging contrary to the Procurement Act and corruption under Criminal Offices Act, 1960 (Act 29). Secondly, the Agyapa Royalties Report also discovered that the appointment of the President’s cousin’s Africa Legal Associates and its partner White & Case, was unique, flouted the procurement processes, constituted bid rigging, and was also tainted by corruption leading to the suspected looting of about US$2,000,000.00 from the public purse.
The indefatigable Bright Simmons’ eruditely calculated the loss to Ghana on the Agyapa Royalties Transaction into the family and friends’ private annual annuity and sinking fund to be around US$150, 000, 000.00 of income going to a country which was strapped for cash and from which Ghana was negotiating for a loan of US$250 million at 40% interest from that cash-strapped country to demonstrate how corruption laden the Agyapa Royalties Transaction was. The interested reader should listen to Bright Simon’s speech at the 2022 Baah Wiredu Memorial Lecture on YouTube for more revealing details - Baah Wiredu Memorial Lecture - YouTube
What is good for the goose is good for the gander. The 1992 Constitution does not permit patriotic citizens to look on helplessly while an elected President supervises a common perception of a reckless loot of the public purse for personal profit as against an unproven allegations of loot by his predecessor. The President abuses his presidential oath under the 1992 Constitution when he turns round to damnify his predecessor for purposes of an impending election because of a prospective fear that he may be called upon by We the People of Ghana to account for the loot by his Government from 7 January 2017 to 6 January 2025.
Big Brother President Nana Akufo-Addo lied his way to the political office of President of Ghana to fight corruption only to supervise the most perceptually corrupt of all the Governments in Ghana in the Fourth Republic since 7 January 1993. The 1992 Constitution enjoins every patriotic citizen to defend it by not allowing the perpetuation of a one party political system by a President bent on supervising the rigging of the 2024 elections under his watch for his anointed successor, Vice President Mahamudu Bawumia, to hold his back after leaving office on 6 January 2025. The doubting Thomas’ should refresh their memories with the elaborate rigging plan deployed during the NPP internal primaries to nominate the President’s anointed successor as the NPP flagbearer for the 2024 elections which have been attested to daily by members of the NPP themselves.
A free, fair, transparent democratic election and freedom of expression are what the 1992 Constitution guarantees to the sovereign people of Ghana and President Nana Akufo-Addo and his Ministry of Truth cannot be allowed to subvert the guaranteed rights of We the People with subterfuges of terrorism and counterterrorism which is the staple of African tyrants when they intend to deprive the sovereign electorate of their rights to freedom of expression and to their votes and to rig national elections. The 1992 Constitution needs protection from the machinations of Big Brother Nana Akufo-Addo and his Government that seeks to manipulate the guaranteed peace and safety of the Republic of Ghana under the 1992 Constitution for selfish regime perpetuation.
Martin A. B. K. Amidu
28 November 2023