Boakye Djan In Spying Controversy

....South African newspaper links him to Apartheid
MAJOR KOJO Boakye Djan, the No. 2 man in the Rawlings-led Armed Forces Revolutionary Council (AFRC) regime has been cited in an online edition of The Star newspaper of South Africa as having recruited officers for the then intelligence service of the Apartheid regime.

A May 28, 2003 publication in The Star’s online edition, headlined “Comrades who wore two masks” by one Patrick Laurence reported that Boakye Djan recruited the late chief ANC representative in London in the 1980s and member of the Directorate of the ANC’s Security Department, nSolly Smith, alias Samuel Khanyile, as an intelligence officer for the then South African Department of Military Intelligence (DMI).

According to the publication, ANC party spokesperson, Ronnie Mamoepa, in the early 1990s publicly admitted knowledge of the recruitment of Smith by Boakye Djan.

The former Army Major’s name also came up in the online publication as having ensnared the late Francis Meli, then editor of Sechaba, an African National Congress (ANC) journal for the same DMI.

The Star report said the information on this is contained in 25 sensitive documents handed over to ex-South African president Nelson Mandela by the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission that probed human rights abuses between 1960 and 1994.

But friends of the retired Ghanaian Army Major and June 4 advocate says the report is bogus and only meant to discredit him in the quiet but ongoing debate over activities of members of the MONAS movement and the roles they played during the former Provisional National Defence Council (PNDC) rule.

In his own initial reaction to the story, which has been circulated widely to members of the diplomatic corps and Ghanaian media by one John Prempeh, Boakye Djan questioned the motive for the wider circulation of the publication by Prempeh without offering him the chance to respond to the story.

Boakye Djan’s reaction, which is also available of the Internet, noted that the report in the online edition of The Star was full of speculations, opinions and waffles based on hearsays, with no evidence to back it up.

He said the story was nothing more than a pack of repackaged speculation and hearsay of an old story that appeared in a British newspaper even before the death of the two people the report claimed he recruited.

“I deny it as wholly untrue and without proof capable of being corroborated independently and on a credible platform”, Boakye Djan wrote on the 24th anniversary of the June 4 uprising last Wednesday, June 4, 2003.

Boakye Djan also questioned where Ronnie Mamoepa, the ANC spokesperson alleged to have confirmed the allegation against him did the confirmation.

“…The weaknesses in the claim by the author of this latest account of my ANC connections are the following: “We are not told when, where and the occasion for the disclosure of the allegation of an ANC Spokesperson against me and why the ANC is not disputing it…”

He said while the allegation of recruitment of the two alleged spies may be difficult to prove, he would request concrete proof that he was in the pay of the South African DMI.

“There must be proof for example in the form of a payroll, somewhere that indeed I was in the pay of DMI. But where is it? He (writer) does not provide it. And the ANC has not produced it either. Surely an undisputable claim made in the 1990s must have proof by now” noted Boakye Djan.

He said he is strengthened in his denial by an advice in The Star’s article by an official of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission thati it would be “unfair to attach too much importance to the document as it is based on the testimony of paid informers whose motives may have been pecuniary and whose testimony has not been corroborated independently”

“I deserve that protection too until things prove to be otherwise from a credible platform and independent corroboration free from any biased and hidden agendas”, concluded Boakye Djan.

Attempts by Gye Nyame Concord to reach the said John Prempeh as well as Patrick Laurence, the original author of the publication in the online edition of The Star newspaper, who is described as a contributing editor of the paper and editor of Focus, journal of the Helen Suzman Foundation, have failed.

Meantime, this reporter can reveal that Boakye Djan will issue a full-scale reaction on the story by close of today.