Amoateng’s Mere U.S. Imprisonment Won’t Do

By: Kobina Antobam

What a shame, Amoateng! What a dismal failure and disappointment in the Ghanaian experience and the human condition! What a wretched specimen of a human that Amoateng has evolved into, all of it of his own choosing and doing! Yes, what a sad fall from grace! On a second thought, there may never have been any grace or honor in Amoateng’s rise to political stardom during Kufuor’s reign at all.

Of course, all of us want to do well as soon as we become conscious of our existence. Many of us take the honorable route and work hard at school and later in our careers. Some of us succeed beyond our dreams, while many others eke out daily survival. Others barely scratch the surface. Though seldom content with their lot in life, many, uneasy as it often is, accept whatever life deals their way.

Other desperate, malicious, criminal, evil Ghanaians, wired fresh out of the womb with criminal DNA, rather choose to fast-track their way to prosperity, compromising their integrity, throwing out of the window all proprieties, morals, culture, principles, religious tenets, and obedience to law, by victimizing and trampling over their fellow humans in order to bulldoze their way speedily to the top. Many of these people have chosen the disingenuous avenue into politics, where there is certainty of the existence of a refuge for scoundrels.

Just take a good look at the two pictures which the media has fed us of Eric Amoateng. The one photograph of a well-tailored designer-suited Amoateng, with his smooth soft touchable baby face, which makes him look like an apt candidate for a kind, honorable politician (that is, if we ever can find one), decent citizen, a caring father, and even an upstanding executive. Of course, we know now that Amoateng’s past public persona was all fakery.

Then, after spending ten years in an American prison for his role in exporting a near-$6 million worth of heroin through Kwame Nkrumah’s Accra Airport to the United States, a new picture appears of the ex-Parliamentarian, Amoateng, sitting in some office at the Ghana’s BNI. The picture was taken by a photographer of the Graphic Corporation. Let me tell ya (to borrow from Amoateng’s own newly acquired language style), here is one picture that is beyond description.

Amoateng left Ghana more than ten years ago in a tailored suit and tie and came back a hardened ex-con in jeans, gym shoes, and a simple button-down short-sleeve shirt, no longer the soft, smooth-skinned, well-groomed rich NPP politician but a transmogrification from a once slick Ghanaian politician into a middle-aged ex-convict thug-looking monstrosity with a well-chiseled frame, well-developed biceps, and a hardened face, ready to take on the world and to pick up his criminal activities from where he left off. If we didn’t know how a criminal really looks like, the Graphic picture is an excellent portrayal of a thug and what we should be ready for from this monster.

Unfortunate additional evidence that Ghanaian authorities have their hands full of this latter-day transmogrified hardcore, street-type, gangster ex-convict criminal thug is his newly-acquired prison language. This University of Ghana-educated and an ex-Parliamentarian, who once shamelessly flaunted his ill-acquired wealth, now arrogantly shows off to those of us “un-cool” Ghanaians his prison language acquisition: “If you wanna take my picture, you gotta seek my persmission.” Yeah, this is one Ghanaian who is definitely full of crap. Amoateng really makes me ashamed of my long cherished U of G.

What Amoateng has done to shame Ghana makes me wonder if he is the only invaluable treasure Brong Ahafo could endow to Ghana? Please, Amoateng’s Brong supporters, we now have to live with your precious son and we have to spend scarce resources to keep an eye on him now. So, spare us your righteous ethnocentric empathies for the really deserving. We are responsible for him now. Amoateng is now Ghana’s un-excisable malignancy. He is our evil attachment. He is our inoperable tumor. He and all his evil ways belong to us now. Remember, Amoateng sympathizers, that Amoateng was a high-ranking parliamentarian when he chose to get involved in the international trafficking of this deadly poison, heroin. Anyway you turn it, he is crassly stupid!

And the more I think about him, the more I am inclined to suspect that there is something really mentally wrong with Amoateng. First, he goes to the University of Ghana to get a degree in, of all subjects, Religion, and becomes a crooked politician. Then, he disregards his position as a prominent Ghanaian politician of an unidentifiable dubious prestige at the time, but definitely a crooked one, and hops on a plane to the U.S. to personally supervise the storage and delivery of the heroin on U.S. soil. This clearly is a person stricken with the worst imbecilic idiocy.

Considering the additional criminal skills he certainly has picked up in the American prison where he sat, watched American TV, exercised freely, and was well-schooled by other hardened American prisoners for the last ten years, and the well-established statistics of the overwhelming recidivism of American ex-convicts, Ghanaian authorities will sorely fail its decent citizens if they do not keep a constant closer watch on this guy.

What a shame! What a disappointment! If you do not want to accept that Amoateng has always had a criminal streak in him, at least accept the fact that the guy is a very bad man, who sat in prison for good ten years, not a bit concerned about rehabilitation into straight and narrow decency upon his release, but plotted and contrived a way to obtain and use a fake passport. He has proven to us twice that he is a hardened criminal. What other evidence do you need to be completely certain of his character? Please, I don’t care who you are but try and convince yourself that Amoateng is irredeemable. He is a lost case, a basket case.

The one commendable act that Ghanaian authorities undertook was that they denied Amoateng a planned media-covered PR handshaking and hugs, and arrested him right at the Accra Airport and whisked him, sans the anticipated fanfare, off to jail again. I just wish that the authorities would have kept him there and made him spend another twenty years in a Ghanaian prison, not only for obtaining and using a fake passport, but also for the fact that he undertook the shipment of the heroin through the Accra Airport. They should also throw an additional book at him for breaking his oath of office as a Parliamentarian. How unfortunate that he is now amongst us again on bail.

Again, I am fervently pleading with the Ghana safety agencies, now that Amoateng has been let out into our midst, that security personnel should be just one step at the heel of this unreformed crook. Otherwise, if they let him loose and not closely watched, I can safely predict that Amoateng is back in the country to put in practice what he learned in jail, and to wreak much more devastating criminal havoc and incalculable shame onto Ghana and Ghanaians.

Amoateng should also be stripped naked and thoroughly checked for any gang-related prison tattoos. I don’t TRUST the guy, so go ahead, remove all his clothes, and VERIFY! While in the verification process, let him bend over and check his inner recesses for any contraband he may be hiding there! Please, take another look at that Graphic Corporation photograph of our number one notorious crook and you will understand my position.

Remember also that this guy has been quoted as saying that he wants his old parliamentary seat back. Tweaaaaaaa! Only like-minded NPP members will encourage and support his return to politics. Anyway, those who will encourage and support Amoateng’s attempt to regain his parliamentary seat are also irredeemable idiots and dimwits.

Now, let’s talk about the New Patriotic Party. I warned, in my previous article about Amoateng, that the NPP response to Amoateng’s return after his release and deportation from the U.S. would severely injure the party’s reputation, appearance, acceptance, and performance in the upcoming elections.

Photographs of NPP supporters clad in the party colors who trooped to the airport to embrace and welcome back their ex-con presented a sad and disappointing image for the party. I do not accept the excuse that the NPP did not know, authorize, or sanction the airport welcoming party for Amoateng. No PR spin will help the NPP in this case. It only boils down to the delectable ending that the NPP is on a slippery-slope slide into the mud pit of another presidential election loss.

If Mr. Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo, Alan Kyrematen, Afoko and his council of NPP officers, and all other so-called powerful leaders of the party claim that they were not aware that those party members, clad in NPP colors and costumes, had planned a public welcoming party for Amoateng at Ghana’s major gateway to the outside world, then here is an ample reason to conclude that there is a total intelligence breakdown and total disorganization within a party that has always claimed brain-power superiority.

I am also amazed at those NPP members who went to the airport, taunting both the U.S. and Ghana governments with crude placards, such as “COCAINE OR NO COCAINE WE LOVE AMOATENG,” and “AKWAABA AMOATENG, STILL LOVE YOU,” plus those who continue to cuddle Amoateng, and who want him freed by Ghanaian authorities. These people are the most stupidest (double superlative intended) clueless self-destructive sycophants who are on their righteous paths to ruin the NPP. Shame on you, useless NPP supporters! May the ugliest vultures that live in your neighborhoods poop on your heads!

Let me also admonish those Amoateng sympathizers, with oxygen-starved brains, who are against him being tried, convicted, and imprisoned in Ghana that there is a clear fallacy in their contention that taking Amoateng to court in Ghana for his crimes violates the double jeopardy legal principle. The double jeopardy principle does not hold water here. Amoateng was tried and convicted not in Ghana but in the U.S. And he can be tried in Ghana now for violating the laws of Ghana by shipping the heroin through the Accra Airport, for obtaining a false passport, and for violating his parliamentary oath of honor. All of his ill-gotten assets in Ghana can and should be rightfully seized by the government. He can easily be thrown in a Ghanaian jail and the double jeopardy nonsense will be of no use here.

Let me emphasize also that those who argue otherwise from my position do so without providing a single reasoned justification. The view that Amoateng needs no further punishment is based solely on parochial, ethnocentric, and emotional irrationality. On his way back to prison in Ghana, hopefully, Amoateng needs to get down on his knees and profusely apologize to Ghanaians for smearing us with worldwide shame. Those who showed up at the airport in their party colors need to apologize to us, too.

Finally, I would like to caution the NPP that, in addition to its well-publicized ongoing internal disorganization and many other missteps and struggles of late, the party is near doomed to losing the next elections. We can understand how seriously they are milking dry the current economic crisis in the country for a smooth ride to victory in 2016. It won’t be easy, my friends.

You have, without pause, been haranguing and attacking President Mahama and his government without publicly putting forward a single credible and practical solution. By only criticizing and insulting President Mahama as “clueless” and “incompetent,” constantly using ethnic slurs against the President, will definitely not win the NPP the next elections. Amoateng, who has rather unfortunately splattered and smeared more smudge on your imperialist-borrowed red, white, and blue colors, and other unaddressed serious issues within the party, will be the catalyst in NPP’s repeat failure in 2016.

Good day.