Scandals: How our silence emboldened President Akufo-Addo - Part 1

Every government is susceptible to scandals, therefore when a scandal hits a
particular government it is unsurprising because scandals are inevitable and
inescapable. However, the reactions of the citizenry to scandals are extremely
important in informing the government’s response. The level of anger, anguish, and disdain outpour by the society sends a strong signal to the political elite as to how outraged they are or otherwise.

I intend to revisit some of the most disgraceful scandals that have hit this country under the current Akufo-Addo/Bawumia-led administration and how Ghanaians have sat aloof for these scandals to be normalized in the past seven years.

In the words of Rene Girard, “When scandals proliferate, human beings
become so obsessed with their rivals that they lose sight of the objects for
which they compete and begin to focus angrily on one another”. In the past
seven years, under the presidency of Nana Akufo-Addo, Ghanaians have been
bedevilled with an unimaginable series of scandals that go a long way to
suggest that, the current administration does not learn anything from history,
or it suffices to conclude that, they have no respect for the ordinary Ghanaian.
As a result of our passiveness, the current administration has been emboldened to continuously churn out scandals for their benefit while calling the bluff of Ghanaians.

When President Akufo-Addo and Dr. Mahamudu Bawumia were sworn into office, many believed that the sunshine of hope, wealth, and prosperity was going to break through the clouds of hopelessness, poverty, hunger, and destituteness, however, they flattered to deceive unimaginably with scandals upon scandals. In this part, two scandals are revisited.

BOST Contaminated fuel scandal:

One of the shocking orchestrated scandals executed with the sole objective of
enriching the appointees of the Akufo-Addo and Bawumia-led administrations is
the Bulk Oil Storage (BOST) limited scandal. In 2017, (BOST) Limited, sold five
million litres of contaminated fuel to Movenpina. Astonishingly, Movenpina
was incorporated barely a month after it negotiated the deal with BOST and
without a National Petroleum Authority (NPA) license. There was a brief public
uproar, which led to the setting up of a nine-member committee.

However, nothing substantial emerged from the committee. No one was prosecuted for this well-strategized and superbly implemented stealing scheme. This is
irrespective of the findings of the committee. Some of the findings were that
thousands of litres in the tank locked by the NPA could not be accounted for, and a total of 862,875lts of the 5 million litres of contaminated fuel could not be unaccounted for. The Committee admits that there must have been some
evaporation but finds the volume loss of about 17.16% unusual.

Revealingly, the Committee found this very irregular and disturbing and
concluded that clean products may have been deliberately downgraded and sold as slop or off-spec. The committee writes: “This we believe borders on criminality and may have wilfully led to a major loss to BOST and the state in the form of petroleum taxes forgone”. It beggars belief that no one was made to answer for this outrageous theft. In today’s Ghana under President Akufo-Addo, there are no consequences for wrongdoings, SIMPLICITAS.

The PDS Scandal:

When President Akufo-Addo and the New Patriotic Party (NPP) assumed authority of the state in January 2017, Ghanaians were filled with hope and believed that a political Messiah had arrived. The new government immediately re-negotiated the Power Compact signed by President John Mahama and changed the shareholding structure to 51% Ghanaian and 49% foreign.

Ghanaians were convinced that it was a good idea to have indigenes take
majority shares of the consortium and that the government would spread the
ownership of the shares to all Ghanaians through a private subscription to the
Ghana Stock Exchange, but in the end people were shocked to see that it was
all part of a grand scheme for certain members of the president’s family and
their cronies to take over the Electricity Corporation of Ghana (ECG) in a
a blatant attempt to capture state resources.

Ghanaians sat aloof, unconcerned, and unperturbed while these acts of
political atrocities and terrorism were unleashed on us by the Akufo-Addo and
Bawumia led administration. Some civil service organizations briefly expressed
their disgust and displeasure, without consistency and perseverance. The
silence of the clergy and other stakeholders was deafening. As a country, our
silence, timidity, and reticence in the face of these scandals will not be forgiven by future generations, whose future is being toiled with insensitively by the Akufo-Addo and Bawumia-led governments.

The reaction of the citizenry has been so passive that it exposes our cowardly nature that emboldens the current regime to have its way of perpetrating these crimes against the very pupils they are expected to serve.