“Too mature and successful to steal” – Akufo-Addo

On an electioneering campaign tour of the Volta Region, recently, the 2016 Presidential Candidate of the main opposition New Patriotic Party (NPP) was reported to have said that he was too old to use the power and influence of public office to fleece the citizens of Ghana (See “I’m Too Old To Steal Ghana’s Money – Akufo-Addo” MyJoyOnline.com / Ghanaweb.com 9/3/15).

What the former Attorney-General actually meant was clearly lost in translation by Mr. Isaac Essel, the Multi-Media correspondent who reported the same. What Nana Akufo-Addo actually said was that he had lived long enough and achieved adequate financial success to think of amassing wealth illegally at the expense of the very people from whom he was seeking the mandate to govern and facilitate the rapid and salutary development of the country.

He also proceeded to assure his prospective and potential electors that the taxpayer’s money would be secure under his watch, and would be strictly devoted to the purposes for which such money would be earmarked.

I firmly believe that his heart and mind are in the right place, especially when the three-time New Patriotic Party Presidential Candidate also promises not to entertain any rascally kleptomaniacs under his watch. What Nana Akufo-Addo needs to do more of at this juncture, is to ensure that the finances of the NPP at party headquarters and elsewhere around the country are in sound order. For instance, we have just learned that some party operatives have established foreign accounts with monies suspected to belong to the largest opposition political organization in the country.

As of this writing, the NPP’s National Chairman was widely reported to have referred the matter to the Criminal Investigations Division of the Ghana Police Service. I shall devote a separate column to take up and discuss the matter.

We also learn that the party’s parliamentarians have stopped making consensually stipulated regular contributions to the party’s coffers, because of what the New Patriotic Party’s Leader in Parliament, Mr. Osei Kyei Mensah-Bonsu, claims to be the practical lack of any administrative and electioneering-campaign assistance from party headquarters to these national assembly representatives.

We shall also take up this matter in due course, particularly the ways in which we find the latter issue to be directly connected to the alleged financial improprieties that Mr. Paul Afoko, the NPP’s National Chairman, has reportedly bitterly complained about. We hope that Nana Akufo-Addo’s “Arise And Build” electioneering campaign theme would equally resonate with the party’s key operatives at the NPP’s Kokomlemle headquarters. For charity, it has been said time without number, ought to begin at home.

Needless to say, if Nana Akufo-Addo cannot promptly effect the sort of changes needed to make the New Patriotic Party a winsome political apparatus and institution, then there is even less reason to believe that the three-time NPP Presidential Candidate really has what it takes to return Ghana to the salutary path of sound and rapid economic development.

Indeed, Ghana’s former Foreign Minister talks a great game, when he asserts pontifically that Ghanaians have absolutely no reason to be wallowing in poverty but for the criminally “massive mismanagement and corruption” callously induced by the Mahama-led government of the so-called National Democratic Congress.

But we must also not lose sight of the fact that it was a hopelessly complacent President John Agyekum-Kufuor who told a BBC-World Service correspondent that corruption was as ancient as the birth and/or creation of the Biblical Adam and Eve.

In other words, even as he vigorously campaign on the otherwise quite remarkable record of the erstwhile Kufuor-led New Patriotic Party, Nana Akufo-Addo also needs to tread a cautious balance between offering praises to the former President and deftly and diplomatically distancing himself from such reckless and flippant remarks as the Adam and Eve corruption canard. Indeed, it was all-too-apt and timely for Nana Akufo-Addo to pooh-pooh the morbidly facile attempt to turning Dr. Mahamudu Bawumia’s exposé of the NDC’s criminal packing of Ghana’s Voters’ Register with Togolese citizens into a tribal issue; but, of course, it would have been even more effective if the renowned trial lawyer had also underscored the fact that Dual-Citizenship Voting was presently prohibited in the country, although the latter’s consideration was technically still on the books of the country’s legislative assembly.

Akufo-Addo could then have even more pointedly added that it was the key NDC operatives, now making a tribal issue out of Dual-Citizenship Voting, who virulently opposed the same when this very fundamental civil rights matter was progressively tabled as a motion in Parliament during the Kufuor-led tenure of the New Patriotic Party.