A season of allegations!
“Truth is beautiful, without doubt; but so are lies.’’ — Ralph Waldo Emerson
Yes the times are rife with very wild allegations, accusations and beliefs.
Advertisement
Many things got my attention in this vein this week, and wonderfully enough, none of them reaches to the level of useful and usable information.
The only useful line of enquiry is to unpackage why the proponents of these allegations are busy.
Meanwhile our airwaves and newspapers are awash in giving them life and resuscitating the dead and forgotten ones, as if the purpose of living in society is to find fault and, if one is able to criminalise the fault, the better.
It is plain Orwellian where believing in officialese is mandatory, not the result of rational choice by society and individuals.
My readers will recall I dismissed one of such only weeks ago, the documentary on the abduction and murder of three High Court judges and an army officer, produced in the exciting tones of pointless President John Kennedy killers‘ documentaries in America.
I do not know how they will eventually end, but one thing is certain, they would not increase our Gross Domestic Product or our overall national well being and happiness. Once these allegations do not affect the price of fuel or the dollar exchange rate, we are going nowhere with them.
Expose
The main story is the whole confusion surrounding the new Joy FM alleged exposé of a research project for the previous government of former President John Mahama funded with part of donor monies meant for the construction of seven district hospitals.
The alleged source of this frantic chase now involving the Special Prosecutor is one sentence in a report from Cambridge Analytica, the group accused of using computer technology to affect electoral outcomes in several countries, and which, understandably, is fighting tooth and nail to prevent its own collapse.
One sentence? You just have to love Ghanaian politicians and journalists.
Names of high officials in government and business are mentioned in the Panama Papers last year, and that gets less investigatory interest than a line in a report from a doomed group.
Others, minor but no less notable, were for example the current poll signposting popular reactions to official policies like Free SHS education policy of the government, and the emphatic rejection of the national cathedral concept by Ghanaians of whom a majority are Christians, and also of barter arrangements with China, etcetera.
The Joy FM news item stretches credulity. Where did Joy secure the questions they asked because they were not part of the approved documentation of the donor funds okayed by Parliament?
Why should we believe Joy over our Parliament? Especially since in the bus branding saga, for example, the monies were found in the estimates?
Is this whole matter supposed to be an explanation why work has stalled or stopped on the construction of the six remaining medical facilities?
Is this the new method of discovering corruption in the search to prove projects of the previous administration were overpriced?
How can that be if some monies were siphoned off for partisan pursuits?
This is just too convoluted since the hived-off $6 million cannot be enough to have completed the remaining works. And Rojo Mettle-Nunoo was a deputy minister in the Professor Atta Mills government, not President Mahama’s.
The only true statement about him is that he has been a researcher of the opposition National Democratic Congress (NDC), but he has since emphatically denied any such connection of his work as deputy health minister then with this report.
Most surprising
The Cambridge Analytica dimension is the most surprising of all. It does not absolve locally interested authorities or persons from binding proof. In fact this source of the entire news item reveals that the intention is to affect growing morale in the opposition NDC as it heads to internal party executive polls in a few weeks time.
Our system of justice has rested since 1874 on the presumption of innocence of suspects and due process firmly embedded in the 4th Republican constitution.
Those who pretend those fingered in their anti-corruption zeal are not expected to defend themselves but must be hauled to jail straightaway will do well to read carefully the meaning of the case of then Attorney-General Victor Owusu in 1968 in Ex-parte Salifa in an Accra high court presided by the recently departed Justice VCRAC Crabbe.
The only way to get one’s wish to punish the allegedly corrupt or lawless citizen without recourse to our laws is to stage a coup.
President Kufuor after using the constitutionally legal route, still found it necessary to pardon all of the officials of the President Rawlings regime tried, convicted and jailed.
Tsatsu Tsikata, the most famous of them all, later got his arrest, arraignment, trial, conviction and jailing overturned completely by the Appeal Court meaning that no money was lost or that if it was, he was not responsible or he must be retried.
Alleging or believing or thinking wrongdoing has taken place is not proof of anything and can never be.
The government of President Akufo-Addo and the ruling New Patriotic Party (NPP) are very aware that satisfying the Ghanaian electorate is a taxing and thankless business.
The example of the Ameri emergency power plant is there for all to appreciate.
[email protected]