General News of Saturday, 27 March 2021

Source: www.ghanaweb.com

Which one do we believe, which one do we not? – Ben Boakye quizzes letters from Pres Office

Benjamin Boakye is the Executive Director of ACEP Benjamin Boakye is the Executive Director of ACEP

The Executive Director of the African Center for Energy Policy, Benjamin Boakye, is questioning the veracities of all the letters coming from the office of the President and signed in the name of Executive Secretary, Nana Bediatuo Asante.

This comes on the back of comments by Osei Kyei-Mensah-Bonsu, the Minister for Parliamentary Affairs, on the matter of the executive slashing down the budgetary allocations to both the legislature and the judiciary.

According to Kyei-Mensah-Bonsu, the details of the letter from the president's office were without the knowledge of the president. To wit, he said that President Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo was not aware of the details of that letter.

Reacting to this while speaking on Newsfile on JoyNews on Saturday, March 27, 2021, Benjamin Boakye indicated that it gives cause to worry about the many letters that have emerged from the president's office, signed in the name of his secretary.

He wondered, with such a revelation, which of the letters of such nature should be considered to have interpreted the minds of the president, and which did not.

“It’s not really about believing it or not. I think I’m even much more worried beyond that, where the president’s secretary writes and the president says I’m not aware or somebody says the president was not aware. And that fundamentally, raises some significant questions about the many letters that have been coming from the president’s secretary. Which one do we believe and which do we not? And much of the work we have done, really, that we’ve done, that are contentious, we’ve got the flag from a foreign country.

"Most of them bear the signature of the Executive Secretary, so, which one was the president aware and which one was he not aware? You’re talking about AMERI, you’re talking about Agyapa, you’re talking about the transfer of the Aggregator Row of gas from the GNPC to Ghana Gas. These are significant contentious issues that have implications for the physical nature of Ghana and all of them bear the signature of the executive Secretary. So the fundamental question is that, when we are rolling back and tracking these letters, which ones can we say that the president indeed knew about and which ones did he not know,” he explained.