Maybe the Johnsons brib£d nobody…

His Excellency President John Mills, true to his unflinching commitment to weed corruption out of his administration moved in swiftly to direct the Attorney General even while on a foreign trip, to direct a full scale investigation into the Mabey&Johnson scandal. The Attorney General, Mrs. Betty Mould Iddrisu, promptly wrote to the UK Serious Fraud Office and the Ministry of Works and Housing to furnish her outfit with details of the court proceedings and other records available in the Ministry on the transactions of the company in Ghana spanning the same period between 1991 to 2005, a period spanning the Jerry Rawlings and the John Kuffour administrations.

Alhaji Abubakar Saddiq, a one time NPP Member of Parliament for Salaga and Minister of Works and Housing under the Kufour-led kickback infested government, vehemently denied the allegations and said that the “£500” he claimed he received from the company was nothing next to a bribe but a gift for him to pay his school fees as if the company was a charity organization or its Directors his relations.. The Judgment intimated in paragraph 121 that “In 1996 Saddique Bonniface was the ECGD desk officer in the Ministry of Finance (he was recently until the change of government a highly placed politician within the Ghanaian administration). He had a bank account at the National Westminster Bank in Rickmansworth. On 20 February 1996, Saddique Bonniface received a transfer of £ 10, 000 from M&J to an account at Barclays Bank Plc in Watford. On 29 October 1996, the same account received a transfer of £ 13, 970 from M&J… on 7 March 1997, same date on which Saddique received an amount of £2,500. The latter 2 transactions were ordered by Director B ”.

From this point, it is clear that Bonniface lied when he called into various radio stations to claim that he received only £ 500 pounds for fees. A basic arithmetic on the figures frightenly revealed that Saddique Bonniface , a darling boy of the NPP took more of the monies (a handsome £26,970) from Mabey&Johnson instead of the shameless lies he is peddling all over the place than any other person named in the scandal.

I am most impressed that investigations are on going and it is important that we await the final outcome of the investigations before we rush to town with half baked accusations and desperate attempts to link innocent citizens to the damning allegations. What I rather find equally scandalous is the extent to which the SFO in UK went in protecting the Directors of Mabey& Johnson in this whole scandal while the courts allowed names of non British citizens to be brandished openly. I understand a Jamaican Minister of State had to fly hurriedly to the Court to clear his good name at the latter part of the prosecution. I wonder why the Ghanaians involved were not informed about the developing issues and the need for them to be present in the courts to get a fair hearing.

The issue is still developing and I hope the Attorney General will not disappoint us by not digging deeper into the scandal and bring to light the ill motives behind it. We have witnessed worst scandals in the immediate past. Mention can be made of the Muktar Bamba Visa racketeering fraud in the Kuffour-led NPP administration. Bamba was fired and the President defended him by saying on radio “what else do you expect me to do? He has been sacked and that is it”. The matter was never investigated let alone prosecuted. Mention can also be made of the kickback scandal involving Ex President Kuffour himself and Harunna Esseku, his Party Chairman. Other names mentioned in the Mabey&Johnson scandal include Mr. F.O Mparry who was the Cabinet Secretary to the Kufour-led government. Those who are dying to link the NDC as a party to this whole Drama who understand next to nothing about governance, legal and administrative issues should know that the fact that the some of the persons involved belong to a political party doesn’t mean that it is the party that is on trial. Can we then say that the recent arrest of the country manager of Tullow Oil in Ghana and his extradition to the USA to assist in the investigations of a fake company allegedly registered by 3 big wigs within the Kufour administration in cahoots with him is enough grounds to say that the NPP sold out the oil stakes in the Western Region to themselves as they did to the Ga lands? More scandals are yet to be uncovered and it is too early for anyone to hastily conclude based on a lopsided argument from a foreign court that one party is guilty or the other is not.

To draw any intelligent, informed and meaningful lessons from this whole drama, the Investigations must not be truncated but facilitated by both the government of Ghana and Britain to inject sanity into future transactions between these two development partners in future. Lets not forget that the Vodafone issues is still unresolved both at the Ghana Labour Commission level and at the level of the Committee tasked to review the agreement by the Minister of Communications. Going by Saddique‘s defenseless and shameful arguments, at what point in a negotiation is a gift a Gift; a gift a Bribe; a bribe a Bribe; and a Bribe a Gift? Until this dichotomy is dissected, all gifts will remain as such and bribes will assume their status quo.

In Ghana we trust!

Jestina Kusi- Asiedu

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