Re: Sam Jonah: African Governments must support Local Investors over FDI's

I wish to respond to the above news item carried by Joy FM on Thursday, May 6, 2010.

When Benjamin Zephanir, one of the greatest poets of our time, was slated for the coveted honor of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in 2003, he admirably spat on the honor, calling it a legacy of colonialism which reminds him of “thousands of years of brutality—it reminds me of how my foremothers were raped and my forefather’s brutalized. “

Around the same time, Sam Jonah, the former head of Ashanti Goldfields, what used to be a state-own property, was also slated for the Knight of the British Empire (KBE). While Ras Zephanir, on the back of poetry gained the recognition of an empire in demise, Jonah’s was purely on the back of our heavenly endowed natural resource—gold. But the former turned down the coveted award any African trapped in egoistic titles will be dying for, simply on principles. But for the later, whose greatness was only a matter of how much of the precious stone he could dig out and hand out to his awardees for a pittance, “SIR” by his name was worth the world. Do you see the irony?
Boiled down, the basic issue is this: Ghana’s wise man, Dr. Sir. Sam Jonah, for over three decades, could not transform the company handed to him by his pal, Jerry John Rawlings, and make it become one an economic bastion for just the people of Obuasi, let alone the country Ghana. All he could do was to mortgage the company to the West, boasting of it being the first African company to be listed on the New York Stock Market. How AGC’s presence on the New York Stock Market has helped impoverished villages around Obuasi and its environs, nobody can tell. A visit to Obuasi and its environs reveal communities ravaged by long years of mining. The roads are in a dilapidated state. Water and sanitation are as well in their worst forms. Infrastructures across the communities do not depict the status of a community whose precious metal has propelled the once mighty Ashanti Goldfields to the powerful New York Stock Exchange.
In a recent article, which appeared on Ghanaweb titled “How Goldman Sachs Screwed Ghana,”from a source identified only as Tully/GHP, the writer takes us down memory lane (article available at:
http://www.ghanaweb.com/GhanaHomePage/NewsArchive/artikel.php?ID=180487 ). Any critical mind that has followed the rise and fall of AGC in the last two or three decades will agree that Dr. Sir. Sam Jonah and his cronies have shortchanged the economic life of Ghana for a “useless” title. When he even was made the President of AngloGoldAshanti , industry observers knew it was a negotiated settlement. Dr. Sir Jonah did not have any decision making influence over the company. Readers will recall two important events that still leave myriad of unanswered questions: the toppling of Ohene Kena as Ghana’s energy ministers, the ministry with oversight responsibilities for the mining sector, when he was representing the Ghana government in London in negotiations regarding AGC. The other was Rawlings’s outburst and use of unsavory words to describe the supposedly Ghana’s wisest man in the days following AGC’s troubles.

Dr. Sir. Sam Jonah shifted camp and became the darling boy of the NPP and was made the board chairman of Ghana Airways. Interestingly, he failed to avert the financial leakages and woes of the company. His business acumen had already begun to take a nosedive.

The question is for over two decades, Jonah was an important part of the Rawlings economic team. They scouted the globe in their so-called attempt to attract Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) to Ghana. We are all aware of the results of those endeavors. He jumped ship and became the NPP’s financial strategist and again part of Kufour’s over 300 useless trips. A colleague on a flight to Japan recently spoofed Kufour’s trips as cumulatively more expensive that the so-called investor capital he tried to attract from abroad.

Now to point. At the recent World Economic Forum on Africa, held in Tanzania, Jonah was advocating a domestic-driven investment mobilization. He went on, in an interview with Kojo Nkrumah of Joy FM, to blame lack of indigenization policy which made it impossible for even him to invest in AGC and in the Ghanaian economy.

The question is: if Dr. Sir. Sam Jonah could not champion this thinking with all the leverage he held within the PNDC, NDC and recently the NPP, and he would now be complaining about lack of indigenous capital, then Ghanaians must be asking why now? After relocating over 126 million rands from the Ghanaian economy to South Africa, he now turns around to blame the system he had pillaged for many years of its lack of indigenization.

The truth is that he could not even invest that in the Ghanaian economy for fear of the NDC questioning his wealth in case of a change of government.

Kojo Nkrumah, it is understandable that you are not a trained journalist, but I am certain that there are books you can read to understand what interviews are meant to be when you are in the seat and conducting interviews with men like that. I have heard many people extol your interviewing skills, but I think they fall far below expectations anytime I listen to you. Try to research the background of your interviewees and have a dossier on them before you meet them. This way, you will certainly be asking the right questions as a journalist should do. Journalism is not an opportunity to create a conduit for people like Jonah to say what they feel and get away without answering questions regarding their past decisions and judgments that affected the fortunes of a whole nation.

Don’t tell me he was even part of Thabo Mbeki’s economic team. What did they achieve? They failed miserably and the intellectually-aloof Mbeki has to be forced out of power.

Next time, ask the right questions.

Samuel K. Glover
Financial Communications Expert
Monterey Bay, California

Email: samuelglover43@yahoo.com