The chickens are slowly, but surely coming home to roost. After a number of close shaves in which former President John Dramani Mahama has been cited for bribery and corruption and left off the hook, this one has the tendency of nailing the Bole/Bamboi landlord and scatter his second coming as President of Ghana.
It started as early as 2009, at the time the ink on the paper that officially swore him in as Vice-President of the Republic had hardly dried up. With deceased President John Evans Atta Mills terribly ill at the time of his ascension to power, Vice-President Mahama was virtually doing the running.
The first indication that something terrible was amiss was when the Vice-President was said to have led the procurement team to buy an Embraer Aircraft from Brazil. Allegations were rife that the price of the aircraft moved on the negotiating table through the roof. All manner of reasons, including specifications and the installation of a play station, were allegedly cited.
A number of tongues wagged on the political and social front. Now Special Prosecutor Mr. Martin Amidu claimed at the time that the now deceased President Atta Mills even set up a committee to investigate his Vice. The former President passed away under mysterious circumstances before the commission was formally inaugurated, we were told.
However, the man who called himself Citizen Vigilante before his new appointment chickened out on the allegation when he sat before the Appointments Committee of Parliament during his vetting for his new job.
Then was the infamous Ford Exhibition four wheel drive vehicle offered by a Burkinabe contractor to the then President in return for juicy road contracts. Ace investigative journalist, Manasseh Azure Awuni, travelled all the way to Ouagadougou to engage Mr. Kanazuri.
The juicy bit of the news was that former President Mahama agreed that he was offered the car gift, and that the contractor was awarded a construction job on the Eastern Corridor road.
Mr. John Dramani Mahama went to the extent of praising the contractor to the high heavens for executing a fantastic job. I have always said that God, the Almighty, is not a Nigerian. It took only one rainfall to expose the shoddy job executed on the bribe contract front.
When he was being bashed left and right for using his high office to accept a bribe, Mr. Mahama’s defence was that, as a person, he did not like American cars, and that the Ford Exhibition vehicle was added to the Presidential pool.
There is more. In the run-up to the 2016 presidential election, another allegation of scandalous behaviour involving Mr. John Mahama did the rounds. This time, he was accused of offering a 4×4 vehicle to bribe Bugri Naabu, Chairman of the Northern Regional branch of the then opposition political party, the New Patriotic Party, with the intention of inducing Mr. Naabu to deliver the NPP presidential votes in the region to Mr. Mahama.
In all these, shameless characters within the National Democratic Congress blamed the Ghanaian media for making them up.
Now, this blockbuster scandal of bribery has been made in London. According to the prosecution in the Airbus Bribery Scandal, filed at the Southwark Crown Court in London, between 2009 and 2015, Airbus Defence Company dealt with Intermediary 5 based in London to acquire three transport aircraft for the military in Ghana. Intermediary 5 is said to have worked for Government Official 1, an elected official in Ghana.
What made the news juicier in Ghana is the description of Intermediary 5 as a man brought to Britain at the age of 9 and lost contact with his family back in Ghana until the 1990s. Many social commentators believe this fits the description given by Mr. Mahama himself in his autobiography – My First Coup d’état. In the book, the author is said to have mentioned one of his father’s sons who was sent as a child to London by a childless missionary couple. Apparently, the man arrived in the United Kingdom and lost touch with the original family back in Ghana.
As Muhammad Ali famously said of his opponents: “You can run, but you cannot hide.” On Thursday, May 14, 2020, the leading tabloid newspaper in the United Kingdom, The Sun, dug into the Airbus bribery scandal involving the very top of Ghanaian politics.
On Page 21 of the newspaper, The Sun headlined its article – Corrie Star, the Prez the 5m pounds Ghana planes scandal – doggy contracts, the newspaper analysed the scam played out in the Southward Crown Court in London, and emphatically descended on the former President. The paper claimed that Government Official 1 listed in the court is no other than former President Mahama, while Intermediary 5 is the relative of the former President who arrived in the UK as a child.
One Ghanaian commentator in London instantly appealed to the good people of Ghana to reject the second coming of JDM. To this person, Mr. John Mahama has too many scandals on his plate to be allowed to return to Jubilee House.
In spite of all the overwhelming evidence of misdeeds, those in the party Jerry Rawlings founded believe that their presidential hopeful performed excellently in office, and that the ruling New Patriotic Party and the Ghanaian media supporting the government in power’s ideology are deliberately maligning the former President.
When the news first broke out, the NDC issued a statement that was straight out of its propaganda factory. The statement, purported to have been written and signed by former Attorney-General and Minister of Justice Marietta Brew Appiah-Oppong, claimed that the allegation in London did not name any Ghanaian official, and that the media in Ghana had deliberately roped in the former President.
I like Dr. Kofi Abrefa Busia, Prime Minister of Ghana in the Second Republic. He said and wrote volumes of books and articles on Ghana. One of his sayings that has become a verse in the biblical image of the Wenchi-born opposition leader at the time of this nation’s independence, is what he said about a politician who had been indicted for wrong doing. “He bears the mark of his own guilt,” Busia said.
Since the scandal broke out just before Covid 19 hit Ghana and put the people of Accra and Kumasi to sleep in that unforgettable lock-down period, Mr. John Dramani Mahama has not uttered a word.
Last week, a member of the young politicians in the NDC, famously described by the party’s founder as babies with sharp teeth, tore into those linking the former president to the scandal and said Mr. Mahama would break his silence very soon, and that would put those linking him to the scandal to shame.
A week has passed since the man who once returned from his hometown and claimed that his driver had stolen quite a hefty sum of money from his car after a weekend rendezvous made the official announcement. Still there is no show from the former president.
Some of us are still waiting. We are eager to be told that the Southwark Crown prosecutors in London got it all wrong, and that there was no bribery scandal in the purchase of the three airbus aircraft paid for by officials at Government House, in the days when Mr. John Dramani Mahama was Head of State of this Republic.
I bet it, what has happened could be a block-buster movie. The script could follow this path. A man born with a silver spoon in his mouth has his half brother taken away to London by missionaries who wanted to offer him a typical British education.
For more than 40 years, the young man taken to London was lost to the family. For all this while, there has been no link. Meanwhile, one of the brothers he left behind in the savannah heat of Ghana rises to become a top politician. Through the man left at home’s political activities the long lost brother re-connects with the remnants of the family, long after the father is called to his maker.
The politician becomes minister, vice-president and president of the republic. He rises to the very to the very top of national politics, when the man who he picked him to understudy him dies in circumstances that have still not been explained to the people.
The juicy bit is that the new president places an order for three aircraft for use by the military. One of the planes gets involved in an accident at the country’s leading airport. No explanation is given to the people as to the cause.
Then like a bolt from the blue, it emerges that the newly-found brother of the president is the intermediary for the country in the purchase of the three aircraft, one of which had the accident.
The film ends with the two brothers facing indictment for huge bribes in the negotiations to buy the plane in London. The movie industry has a lot to chew on. Mahama though, cannot keep quiet forever.
“Those the gods want to destroy, they first make mad,” my apologies to the late Nigerian playwright Ola Rotimi.
I shall return!
The post Mahama appears to bear the mark of his own guilt on Airbus scandal appeared first on The Chronicle Online.
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