Where Has Kofi Bentil Been Lately?

By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.
Garden City, New York
Jan. 4, 2016
E-mail: okoampaahoofe@optimum.net

The news article described him as a “legal practitioner,” a rather quaint and fancy Ghanaian way of describing an attorney or a lawyer; and so I am quite certain that he has been following the judgment-debt scandals that have literally made arrant nonsense of the country’s oil-rich economy. Years ago, I read on one of the legion Ghanaian websites that the average Ghanaian had an Intelligence Quotient (IQ) of 98. It was contained in a global survey, the news report indicated. Well, that was some 10 years ago, and back then this figure was among the lowest even on the African continent. Still, events of the past few years tell me that our national IQ may very well have plummeted even much lower than the one cited above.

The objective here is not to make any individual inferences or impugn the intelligence or common sense of anybody but to simply register my utter consternation over how, generally speaking, as a people we appear to sadly lack critical-thinking skills when it comes to discussing such seismic national issues as the AMERI Group racket in which a middle-man firm located in Dubai, UAE, is reported to have caused the Ghanaian taxpayer at least the loss of some $290 million for virtually no work done. And all this, because our leaders and representatives were too lazy to do the sort of cranial heavy-lifting that attends international contractual compacts.

Of course, I am talking about the 10 thermal power-generating plants with an estimated market value of some $220 million that could have been readily purchased directly from General Electric (GE), the global American industrial giant that manufactured the same. Indeed, in the thick of the sensational media imbroglio that accompanied the breaking of the scandal, first by two reporters from a Norwegian newspaper called VG, I gathered somewhere that, indeed, GE had reached out to the management of the Volta River Authority (VRA) but had been rudely rebuffed because the National Democratic Congress (NDC) government would not step up to the plate to assist a cash-strapped VRA negotiate a deal with GE. Now we know what the cynical denizens at the Flagstaff House prefer to do with the Ghanaian taxpayer’s money.

My problem with “Legal Practitioner” Kofi Bentil, who also doubles as Vice-President of the IMANI-Ghana policy think-tank, is his rather lame suggestion that the AMERI Group scam be referred to Parliament for a possible contractual amendment. Maybe somebody better informed on state side ought to apprise him of the fact that it was Parliament that approved this act of contractual criminality of the highest order. Besides, had it not been for the two Norwegian journalists who brought the entire scam to global attention, our august House’s members would still be patting themselves on the back, across the aisle, and heartily congratulating themselves for a deal savvily cut.

Indeed, Mr. Bentil would do himself great good to listen to his fellow bar associate, Mr. Ace Ankomah, the OccupyGhana lead activist, about the irreparably ruinous terrain that we would be treading if any of our leaders or litigious activists made the equally criminal blunder of attempting to tinker with the AMERI Group Scam which, predictably, even Mr. Alban Bagbin, the Parliamentary Majority Leader, has obscenely described as “a clean deal.”

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