Former Deputy Transport Minister Joyce Bawa Mogtari has said her sister Otiko Afisa Djaba lied when she claimed that she (Joyce) was the cause of a rift between the Gender, Children and Social Protection Minister and their mother.

“Otiko lied, I’m not responsible for the rift between her and our mother,” Mrs Bawa Mogtari told Accra-based Starr FM on Wednesday, adding: “It is palpably false.”

“I refuse to reduce my public discourse to domestic issues that really have no place in our public lives,” she added, saying: “Above all, nothing of this sort happened. Ever! Absolutely not! And certainly has nothing to with me. I don’t even have any recollection of any such thing.”

Ms Djaba revealed on Wednesday that Mrs Bawa-Mogtari, just a week before the 7 December 2016 general elections, conspired with “strangers” and “packed all my things out of my mother’s home in Bole”.

“Strangers went and removed my things, so, I called my mum and I told her that: ‘You’ve evicted me from your house, you’ve evicted me from your life.’ And she apologised for allowing that to happen without my knowledge. So people out there, you don’t know my story, so, don’t use politics to go there,” Ms Djaba told Kwadwo Asare-Baffour Acheampong (KABA) on Asempa FM’s Ekosii Sen political talk show on Wednesday, 8 March in response to queries about whether she was on good terms with her mother, especially with the day being International Women’s Day.

That same question featured prominently during Ms Djaba’s vetting when she appeared before Parliament’s Appointments Committee.

During the Asempa interview, she rebutted forcefully: “I have the right to do whatever I want to do in the area of my mother,” explaining: “A week to the elections, my sister, then-Deputy Minister of Transport Joyce Bawa-Mogtari and spokesperson for the John Mahama campaign, evicted me from my mother’s house in Bole.

“I wouldn’t have brought this up had the NDC not been pestering me about my relationship with my mother. They packed all my things from my mother’s house, so, people must know my story before they get up and be asking me about my relationship with my mother.

“It was all politics, but they claimed they were going to renovate the house, and, so, needed to move my things, but I’m the first born, so, I deserve to be pre-informed about such a thing but nothing was told me. I had so many things in my mother’s house, so I told them to wait till I come over or till I send my child over to pack them out, but they paid no heed.”