Opinions of Saturday, 27 February 2010

Columnist: Prah, Prince

Atta Mills: A Very Wicked Person

President Professor John Evans Atta Mills is a very wicked person. He is a wicked man, a man who deliberately and with his eyes wide open, goes about hurting other people.
I have been following the on-going debate over Kosmos Energy and the EO Group, and my conclusion, is that President Atta Mills is not only opaque, but he is also wicked!
This is a man who is very vicious by nature, a man who, in pursuit of his own political pursuits, would be willing to hurt the economy of this country!
Several years ago, former Minister of Energy Mr. Kan Dapaah travelled to the United States to drive up investor support for our then virtually non-existent oil industry. When he got there, Ghana’s embassy in the United States decided to gather some industry players to be addressed by Kan Dapaah. The man who was charged to gather the industry players was a certain George Owusu, an environmentalist working with Shell International, the oil multi-national.
After successfully organizing the meeting, George Owusu became acquainted to Kan Dapaah and took an interest in assisting some oil companies to come into the nation of Ghana for oil prospecting.
As part of these efforts, he was offered shares in the various consortiums that he brought into the country, which eventually led to the introduction of Kosmos Energy, the company that discovered crude oil in Ghana in commercial quantities, and has resulted in the Jubilee Fields, whose benefits we are all about to enjoy.
For bringing Kosmos into Ghana and serving as the Ghanaian representative, George Owusu and his business partner were offered 3.5 percent shares in the 90% belonging to Kosmos Energy in the agreement between Ghana and the international contractors. GNPC and the government of Ghana hold the remaining ten percent.
It was through the efforts of Kosmos and George Owusu that Ghana eventually, after nearly two hundred years and after the sinking of over one hundred oil wells, that Ghana discovered oil, in commercial quantities!
In terms of years, Owusu and his partners had spent close to six years following up on the dream of oil discovery in Ghana. They had spent tens of millions of dollars. They had sweated blood, and for their reward, they had received a stake in Ghana’s oil.
That was the state of affairs when President Professor John Evans Atta Mills assumed the mantle of power in this country on January 7, 2009. Soon after President Atta Mills and his NDC took over, news began to emerge that Mills and his people were hounding George Owusu.
The NDC was indeed hounding George Owusu. As I write this piece, this person, through whose singular efforts we discovered oil in this country, has had his bank accounts seized. He has had his house raided by BNI thugs.
He has hard his privacy abused, and it is a fact that the Attorney General is currently contemplating hitting him with at least twenty-five spuriously contrived charges!
Mills is indeed a wicked man, for other reasons. When George Owusu was scouring the world looking for investors to come into Ghana to prospect for oil, one of the nations he went to was the communist state of China. He approached one of the biggest Chinese oil companies to partner him prospect for oil. The Chinese were not interested.
Today, after making the situation so uncomfortable for Kosmos Energy, President Atta Mills and his government are waiting for Kosmos to go so that they can seize and sell their shares to the same Chinese people who refused to come to Ghana to prospect for the oil.
Mills is a wicked person, because his interventions in the oil sector, and that of his associates, have the real potential of undermining developments towards bringing the oil to the surface so that this nation can benefit.
I am saying that the antics of Mills and people like Tsatsu Tsikata have a direct bearing on whether this nation would get the oil to sell in time to reap the benefits that we are all waiting so breathlessly for.
But Mills is willing to put all of our hopes on the burner, just so he can score political points, because in his tiny pea-brain, he believes that his predecessor, John Kufuor, is the man behind George Owusu.
When you see Mills, remember one clear fact; he is a man who endorses evil for his own political ends.

Source: prahprince-prince.blogspot.com