Judgement day bonanza
One song which my friend and colleague, Joe Isaac Haizel, usually likes to quote is: “You don’t have veranda, but you want to rear monkey.” Yes, it sounds logical or sensible, because you definitely can’t keep the monkey in your bedroom.
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In the same breadth, one cannot use all the money on him or her to organise a lavish birthday party for his or her child when the child has been sacked from school for non-payment of school fees.
Or no sensible person would spend all his or money on gambling when his or her rent payments are in arrears, or he or she is sleeping in darkness due to non-payment of electricity bills, and has been disconnected from water supply for arrears in water bills.
I’m also not sure if any man who goes round begging from his fellow men for money would simply dash out money to people he meets on the street claiming that his wife owes them without even going home to ask his wife. Yes, there may be some men like that and Ghana could be likened to such men.
Despite the numerous natural resources that Ghana possesses, the country still goes round all the time begging for alms. The worrying situation is that while other countries, out of pity for our situation, continue to give us grants, we have been throwing this money away as if we have no use for money.
What has recently become known to many of us as judgement debt is indeed a judgement day bonanza, where government ministers and high-ranking officials collude and defraud the state by seeking judgement debts payment.
In recent years, Ghanaians have lost count of how many times and how many people and institutions, local land foreign, that we have paid huge sums of money as judgement debts, simply by filing a bogus claim at a court.
With the Ministry of Finance and the Attorney-General’s Department and their officials ready to join the looting brigade, all that one person or a company needs is to file a claim for judgement debt payment.
You could just tell the judge that in your dream you saw that your house had been demolished for a road project, or that you were a contractor who had been awarded a government contract and that in the dream you saw that the contract had been abrogated. Finished!
The next day, go to the Ministry of Finance and tell them you are in to collect your cheque and in no time, you are paid. Ebei, what a country?
Why do we have the Attorney-General’s Department, always with a minister and deputies and several lawyers paid by the taxpayer to defend the country? And what do they do that they always run away when they are supposed to defend the state.
Not long ago, we were awakened by the gargantuan judgement debt paid to Mr Alfred Agbesi Woyome, Isofoton, CP, and others. It even emerged that payments were made to non-existent chiefs and people. In all these cases, the Minister of Justice and Attorney General, the deputies, and all the staff of the ministry refused to do their job. In some cases, the successive ministers or their deputies and the staff were accomplices in the fraud.
What has shocked many Ghanaians this week is the scene at the Judgement Debt Commissioner’s sitting on Tuesday, where it emerged that the Ministry of Finance paid GH¢264,644 to one Peter Abban, who claimed his property had been demolished during the construction of the Kanda Highway.
This ministry’s official who appeared before the Commissioner was bold enough to tell Ghanaians that despite the existence of a formal letter from the Department of Urban Roads, which was in charge of the construction of the Kanda Highway, and, therefore, knew which properties were destroyed or demolished, the ministry still went ahead and paid because the Attorney-General’s Department had asked them to pay.
There is also a company, P and A Construction and Woods, which was paid GH¢313,907.74 in 2008, when, as usual, the Attorney-General refused to defend the state. Strangely, the Attorney-Genera’sl Department refused to appear before the Judgement Debt Commissioner with a lame excuse.
If people paid by the taxpayer could work as robots without any regard to concerns of those who pay them their salaries, then why do we still keep such people and pay them fat salaries and allowances? Perhaps the most lucrative venture at the Ministries of Finance and the Attorney-General and Justice is the creation of judgement debts.
The most annoying aspect of all these destabilising acts by these two ministries is that even when a court had ruled in favour of Ghana, they would still not act upon the ruling. Since when did the court rule that money paid to CP was fraudulently claimed and that the state should retrieve the money? What has the Attorney-General done since then?
One would not be surprised to learn that officials of the ministries of Finance and Justice and Attorney-General have formed judgement debt companies, whose sole trade is to plan judgement debts, knowing very well that once a case is filed in court the money will be paid.
As we still await the end of the Woyome case, and the retrieval of the payment to CP, media reports indicate that more judgement debts are yet to come to the public notice, including the US$12 million to be paid to Balkan Energy of the United Kingdom.
On Thursday, both the Minister of Justice and Attorney-General and the Minister of Information and Media Relations refused to tell Ghanaians the details of that impending judgement debt.
The time has come to bring in all past and present ministers of Justice and Attorney-General to tell Ghanaians how much judgement debts each of them paid or caused to be paid while in office.
It is sad that in these days the age-long held view of a good name being better than riches has vanished into thin air. People in high authority, entrusted with keeping our resources, are the same people who are stealing from us. This has continued because in Ghana it is only the ‘mmobrowa’ who are prosecuted, not the ministers, and their top civil servants who steal the biggest money.
It is my prayer that one day, the real judgement day will come when all these looting brigade members would be thrown into jail, and Ghana will stop paying money to individuals and companies who have done no work for the state.
PS: Mr Inspector-General of Police, having openly accepted that the Police Service had done some wrong in recent past, would you please respond to the children and widow of Adjei Akpor, the 22-year-old man your men killed at Adentan on January 6, 2014, and give them justice?
The author is a Journalist and Political Scientist. He is the Head of the Department of Media and Communication Studies, Pentecost University College, Accra. - [email protected]