Come On, Let the Sale Go On!

I was pleasantly amused to read the apparently well-intentioned letter of cessation suspending all transactions pertaining to the sale of some Four Hotels and Resorts owned by the Social Security and National Insurance Trust (SSNIT) by the Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of the National Pensions Regulatory Authority (NPRA) – (See “NPRA directs SSNIT to stop all engagement with Rock City for the sale of hotels” Modernghana.com 6/28/24). My only beef here is that until the sale of the four hotels hit the banner news headlines, together with the rowdy protests by some SSNIT employees, led by the National Democratic Congress’ Member of Parliament for North-Tongu Constituency, in the Volta Region, I was totally unaware of the existence of any supervisory statutory establishment by the name of National Pensions Regulatory Authority.

So, the most important and logical question to ask here right now is this: Where was the CEO of the NPRA, Mr. John Kwaning Mbroh, when a ginormous sum of $72 million (USD) of the lifesavings of pensioners and retirees and actively engaged civil and public service employees and private sector employees and entrepreneurs went missing at the Accra Headquarters of the Social Security and National Insurance Trust? The preceding heinous act of criminality occurred under the watch of Mr. Haruna Iddrisu, at the time the Mahama-appointed Minister of Employment and Labor who, by the way, at the same time, doubled as the Parliamentary Majority Leader and Member of Parliament for Tamale-South, in the Northern Region. Ultimately, the buck stopped on the Jubilee House desk of then-President John “Ford Expedition Payola” Dramani Mahama. Now, concerned Ghanaians want to know whether any comprehensive parliamentary inquiry was ever established to get to the bottom of precisely whatever happened to the missing $72 million (USD) Ghanaian taxpayers’ money.

And if there was, what were the findings and/or the outcome of such parliamentary investigations or inquiry? For instance, have the culprits so identified ever been brought to condign justice? And if they have, what was the kind and the nature of their disciplinary sanctions? You see, if the preceding steps were never taken, then it constitutes the very apex of hypocrisy for the Chief Executive Officer of the National Pensions Regulatory Authority to be pretending as if he and his associate members on the NPRA Board of Directors are rigidly and transparently enforcing the statutory regulations pertaining to the disposal of properties belonging to SSNIT, such as the four hotels and resorts – namely, La Palm Royal Beach Hotel; Elmina Beach Resort; Ridge Royal Hotel and Trust Lodge – which, we have been told, were operating at significant net losses to the state and had been so operating for quite a considerable number of years.

Equally significant, recently, Ms. Elizabeth Ohene, the renowned veteran and internationally respected journalist and former John “The Gentle Giant” Agyekum-Kufuor-appointed Deputy Cabinet Minister or Minister of State, I forget exactly which – it could have actually been both – wrote and published a rejoinder to the rabblerousing Mr. Samuel Okudzeto-Ablakwa, the North-Tongu NDC-MP, in which the former Editor of the state-owned Daily Graphic pointedly noted that the decision to offload the aforementioned poorly performing SSNIT hotels was never done through or behind the backdoor, and that the Management of SSNIT Proper whose Board of Directors or Trustee she Chairs, systematically went through the laid-down regulatory processes routinely used for the sale of similar properties.

If the foregoing first-hand testimony by Ms. Ohene has validity, including the publication of tender applications and proposals in some of the most widely circulated and read newspapers and media portals in the country, then why would the NPRA’s CEO, to wit, Mr. John Kwaning Mbroh, wait until transactional and contractual activities have reached an almost irreversibly advanced stage or phase before abruptly calling for an immediate suspension of all transactional proceedings? We were all in Ghana when the late President Jeremiah “Jerry” John Rawlings literally quartered up some 120 factories and industrial plants established by President Kwame Nkrumah, Ghana’s first postcolonial leader, under the seminal and umbrella label of the Ghana Industrial Holdings Corporations (GIHOC) and sold these factories and industrial plants at “donkomi” or giveaway prices to, mostly, themselves and their cronies and a select few of their overseas friends and associates, all the name of “Industrial Divestiture,” a move that was supposed to facilitate the rapid and the massive rejuvenation of the country's socioeconomic and industrial development.

Now, we also are all witnesses to the criminal “desertification” of the hitherto robust economic and industrial foundations and climate of our beloved nation. And then you just come to think of it, all this had been done under the specious name and banner of “Probity, Accountability, Transparency and Justice” by the Executioner Apostles of the populist and faux-socialist National Democratic Congress. And today, the same State-Capturing thugs are telling the nation that, somehow, Mr. Bryan Acheampong, the self-made business mogul and diligent proprietor of Rock City Hotels Limited Liability Company renown, has absolutely no right to be afforded a decent and a transparent transactional strategic transfer of ownership of some four very poorly performing SSNIT- or government-owned hospitality facilities in the very country of which Mr. Acheampong also happens to the Minister of Food and Agriculture.

Now, which one is better: A Mahama-led National Democratic Congress’ government that cavalierly steals some $72 million (USD) – it was probably much more – of money belonging to our retirees and pensioners? Or an Akufo-Addo-led government of the New Patriotic Party whose hardworking cabinet appointees and civically responsible operatives promptly step up to the plate, in American baseball parlance, to rescue poorly performing taxpayer-funded firms on mutually profitable and beneficial terms without asking to be paid double salaries for no double work done? Dear Reader, you be the judge.

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By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., PhD
Professor Emeritus, Department of English
SUNY-Nassau Community College
Garden City, New York
June 29, 2024
E-mail: [email protected]