Hands Off Your Hotels? You Donkomized Our GIHOC!!!

There are very interesting questions that have been raised and are still being raised about the widely reported sale of the majority shares in about a half-dozen, or so, poorly operating and/or managed hotels owned by the Social Security and National Insurance Trust (SSNIT), the state-owned and grossly “misoperated” banking establishment by successive Ghanaian governments (See “SSNIT hotels saga: Akufo-Addo to meet organized labour on June 25” Modernghana.com 6/23/24).

The first regards why the downright hypocritical move to halt the sale of majority shares in the aforementioned but presently specifically unnamed hotels is being so fiercely, radically and self-righteously championed by a brazen fool and a pathological liar and a congenital thief (Remember the missing GH₡25,000 Ablakwa share of an undisclosed loot at an Accra cash wash bay?) by the name of Samuel Okudzeto-Ablakwa, the Member of Parliament on the ticket of the country’s main opposition political party, the National Democratic Congress (NDC), a man who was an undeniable key player of the previous John “European Airbus SE Payola” Dramani Mahama-led government, when the humongous and globally infamous sum of $72-million-plus (USD), money belonging to Ghanaian civil and public servants, retirees and private entrepreneurs was criminally lifted out of the coffers of SSNIT, money that, to this day, has yet to be fully accounted for, by the prime criminal suspects, to the owners of the loot by either the previous Mahama regime or the present Akufo-Addo-led government of the New Patriotic Party (NPP).

Now, what the foregoing clearly means is that the North-Tongu MP and former Mahama-appointed Deputy Minister of Education for Tertiary Affairs is not nearly even half the patriotic and the civically responsible Ghanaian citizen and leader that he obviously would have the rest of us, his countrymen and women, believe that he is; else, the former Deputy Information Minister in the government of the late President John Evans Atta-Mills would have also called for a thorough investigation of the SSNIT Mega-Heist, which involved some National Democratic Congress’ stalwarts and political heavyweights that included Mr. Haruna Iddrisu, at the time in question the Mahama-appointed Labor and Employment Minister, a notorious graduate-thesis plagiarist; and Dr. Joshua Alabi, the 2020 and the 2024 Mahama-appointed Presidential-Election Campaign Manager or Director.

The SSNIT Mega-Heist may very well have also included then-President Mahama himself, as clearly evinced by the former Rawlings-appointed Media Shit-Bombing Communications Minister who also criminally and covertly supervised the drawing of double salaries by a remarkable percentage of his own cabinet appointees, even while also hoodwinking Ghanaians into believing that these roguish cabinet appointees were actually coughing up and donating some 10-percent of their monthly or biweekly salaries into a specially established benevolent fund earmarked for the construction of some nondescript CHIP Compounds or Community Health Centers for the upgrading of general healthcare standards in the country.

This is the kind of one-step forward, two-steps backwards Ananse games that the Mahama Posse played with Ghanaians for most of the longest single four-and-half-year presidential tenure in Fourth-Republican Ghana. There is obviously a conflict-of-interest dilemma here, in view of the fact that the man to whom the majority shares of such poorly performing SSNIT-owned hotels as Labadi Beach Hotel, Ridge Royal Hotel and La Palm Beach Hotel are being contractually offloaded also happens to be the substantive Minister of Agriculture, namely, Mr. Bryan Acheampong, the Suhum-born veteran US Marine Reservist who also owns the globally renowned Rock City Hotels on the Okwawu Ridge, which many tourists and jolly participants in the annual Okwawu Paragliding and Easter Festivities take up lodging, in the Eastern Region.

Now, what is equally interesting and significant to note here is that in so virulently agitating for the sale of the aforementioned SSNIT-owned hotels to be effectively halted, Mr. Ablakwa is not absolutely in any way impugning the integrity of the contractual agreement or compact itself; rather, this notorious judicial scofflaw is predicating his grievance and proprietary arrogance on the purely speculative and decidedly tenuous and patently untenable grounds that Rock City did not file its tax returns for the Year 2022. Now, I don’t know what the tax laws pertaining to such commercial enterprises as the hospitality industry, to which the Rock City Hotels belong, say in Ghana, but I am strongly inclined to believe that the deadline for filing its 2022 tax returns may very well not have completely and effectively elapsed, or the corporate entity of Rock City may very well have pleaded for and been granted an extended deadline for filing its tax returns.

Even so, merely because a corporate entity did not file its tax returns in any particular year, in the present context the Year 2022, does not absolutely in any way, shape or form imply managerial insolvency or gross incompetence, unless the plaintiff could also prove beyond any iota of doubt, by providing the general public or Parliament with any forensically credible evidence, Mr. Ablakwa had better promptly cease and desist from such needless acts of calumny or downright defamation of a peer who has obviously distinguished himself in laudable ways that cannot be said on behalf of a politically desperate rabblerousing Mr. Ablakwa.

It is equally ironic for a politician whose own party, the National Democratic Congress, criminally caused the complete collapse of the Kwame Nkrumah- and the proto-Convention People’s Party (CPP Proper)-established Ghana Industrial Holdings Corporation (GIHOC), comprised of some 120 factories and industries, to be pretending to be concerned about the socioeconomic development and the exponential industrial growth of our beloved nation. What a joke!

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By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., PhD
Professor Emeritus, Department of English
SUNY-Nassau Community College
Garden City, New York
June 19, 2024
E-mail: [email protected]