Rawlings Visited Congo, but.....

London (United Kingdom) 26 February 2003 - Last Thursday, the gentle, handsome Kukurantumi boy who also doubles as the chief linguist, of former President Rawlings, Victor Smith, brilliantly admitted that ex-President Jerry Rawlings has indeed visited Congolese leader, Sassou Ngueso for talks in Brazzaville.

The soft spoken Victor Smith also admitted the ex-President visited Brazzaville aboard a French Airplane (not a French military plane as reported by The Vanguard) and rubbished the paper for peddling falsehood.

But not unexpectedly, Victor Smith distanced himself from the report that his boss went to Brazzaville to solicit for arms. And, as the nation’s most recognised traitor, Kwesi Pratt Jnr fights with himself to discredit the report.

However, a Vanguard Investigation Team (VIT) in London confirms that ex-President Rawlings flew back to London from Congo Brazzaville and checked out of his hotel into a private villa located on number 55 Park Lane, near Hilton Hotel in Central London.

A close aid of the former President told The Vanguard that the ex-President is sick and cannot grant audience to reporters or even see friends. But this is a lie. The ex-President has obviously been dazed by the exposure.

Contrary to Victor Smith’s denials, the paper’s reports, which was corroborated by some officers of the Military Intelligence (MI) revealed that an officer of the Ghana Armed Forces who was a very close ally to the ex-President (name withheld) and know to have operated from the operations Room (Ops Room) during the heady days of the PNDC, was subversively waiting to press the trigger.

Meanwhile, in far away Congo Brazzaville, reports reaching The Vanguard say immediately President Sassou Nguesso saw his friend off at the Maya Maya International Airport, he deployed troops to Point-Noire to guard a large quantity of arms including three helicopter Gun-Ships at Point Noire, a port city in Congo which attracted a lot of local and international criticism. The entire consignment is reportedly still located at Point Noire.

In Accra, twenty out of nineteen callers to phone-in programmes hosted by some of the most popular FM stations roundly condemned the plot by the ex-President. The callers touched on ex-President Rawlings track record as a serial coup maker and asked the security agencies to be on the alert.

A caller who contributed to a Radio Gold programme that discussed the most topical issue of our time now, said even though the ex-President is a spent force, he is capable of any mischief because he did the same thing to the late Dr Hilla Limann in the 80s.

He asked the government and indeed the security agencies to be extra vigilant because the forces of evil are still lurking in the dark. But the opposition NDC, the party the ex-President created, see things differently.

In a terse release (not copied to The Vanguard) signed by its general secretary, Dr Nii Armah Josiah Aryeh, the NDC condemned the Vanguard report, describing it as baseless. Like the NDC, Victor Smith linked some operatives of government to the story, demanding investigations by the Inspector General of Police, the National Security Coordinator and the Director of Bureau of National Investigations (BNI).