Kwesi Botchwey Slams Ghanaweb

... Solicitors adviced to take appropriate action
.... Plans To Sue?
Dear Sirs
I am writing to express my outrage at an article headed ?Kwesi Botchwey Attacks NDC Gov?t? published as a news item on your news summary for May 7, 2004, purporting to be a report of remarks I am supposed to have made at a seminar in Accra in the last week of April 2004.

The article which was published without any attribution ? you failed to name a source or author - claimed that I made the reported remarks in what the writer called ?a surprise sneak attack? and a ?brutally frank tirade? at the said seminar. As a matter of fact and record, I was not in Accra in that week. I was in far away Cambridge MA, USA.

Indeed, again as a matter of fact and record, no such seminar took place in Accra in that week in which I or anybody else participated. This was all a complete fabrication What your mysterious writer evidently did was to take a speech I delivered at a public expenditure management seminar in Accra about TEN YEARS ago, when I was still Minister of Finance, take bits and pieces of my remarks out of context, and reformulate others in his own quirky and occasionally incomprehensible prose ? for example the writer had me down as complaining about ?shortfall in cocoa production and prices of and lower-than-expected external aid? (!!) as other economists warned the government about ?the paucity of their projections?- and serve it to the public as a report of remarks I made at this imaginary seminar in Accra in April 2004. Indeed your writer was in such haste to perpetrate his mischief and perhaps collect his bounty from a paying patron, that he failed to notice that his article referred to me not as a former Minister of Finance but as a serving ?Minister of Finance, Dr. Botchwey?, as the ten year old news file that he sought to shamelessly subvert had rightly described me. He was so beside himself that he failed to notice the blatant absurdity of reporting these remarks as having been made in April 2004. How could I have been ?revealing?, in April 2004, as your writer claims I did, that ?the country was losing external aid simply because the government bodies do not have a clue as to what is expected of them when they were preparing the necessary requirements??

I find it hard to believe that we live in times, in our blessed country, when a journalist can simply fabricate a report of an imaginary seminar in Accra, take remarks made in the early nineties by me at an expenditure management seminar, turn them around to suit his purposes and represent them to the reading public as having been made in April 2004 when I was physically outside Ghana, and have this published on your website, unattributed, for the entire world to read.

I find it shocking that you operate by standards of journalistic practice that allow publication of such a shameful lie. But I leave that on your professional conscience.

My purpose, in writing this mail, which I demand you publish in full and as prominently as you did the offending article, is to express my outrage and put you on notice that I have instructed my solicitors to take appropriate action against all affected parties to redress the gratuitous injury that the unattributed article and your publication of it have caused to my name and peace of mind.

Kwesi Botchwey

Accra, May 12, 2004