1. In December 2021, I submitted a right to information (RTI) request to the Office of the President on President Akufo-Addo’s past trips (May to September 2021) and private jet rentals. The main information I wanted was how much the state had spent on those trips and how the services of the private jets were procured. The presidency denied me the information, citing security concerns. Dissatisfied, I petitioned the RTI Commission, which ruled in favour of the presidency in June 2022. That effectively ended my quest for accountability on how the state spent the money.
2. I had no doubt in my mind that the presidency was running away from accountability because, in June 2022, the same office that cited security reasons for denying me information on the cost of Akufo-Addo’s PAST trips published a full itinerary of the president’s ongoing trip to Belgium and Rwanda. The presidency released information on which airlines and flights the president used and would be using after Samuel Okudzeto Ablakwa alleged that Akufo-Addo’s trip to Germany was by a chartered flight.
3. Today, Samuel Okudzeto Ablakwa, who held the NPP administration’s feet to the flaming fire of accountability and scrutiny, is the Minister for Foreign Affairs. The NPP is demanding information on the cost and details of expenditure in evacuating the 1,964 Ghanaians from South Africa in the wake of the xenophobic attacks.
4. Unlike many politicians who preach transparency in opposition and practice opacity in government, Mr Ablakwa has gone all out to provide extensive details of the evacuation, including names of all the people evacuated, their phone numbers and other details such as their passport information, the sheet on which all the evacuees signed for the 5000 cedis resettlement allowance and the 500 cedis transport allowance.
5. When the Research Desk of JoyNews began its analysis, the Foreign Affairs Ministry, without waiting for JoyNews to apply, volunteered information and data such as receipts, names, and signed sheets of evacuees, as well as invoices covering the evacuation.
6. In my decade and a half as a journalist in Ghana, I have not seen this level of honest and proactive disclosure of documents by a state agency or government officials in aid of accountability. This is the gold standard that public offices and officials should emulate.
7. Okudzeto Ablakwa and the Foreign Affairs Ministry could have sought refuge from accountability by hiding behind the RTI law’s exemption clauses and refused some disclosures because they concerned people’s private information. That refusal would have been more grounded and reasonable than the cost of the private jet rentals I sought from the Akufo-Addo regime.
8. The extent of the disclosure pointed to a major conclusion: that the minister had nothing to hide or knew not of anything that needed to be hidden. If money is involved and every person who signed for the money, along with their phone numbers and details, is handed over to the media for verification and scrutiny, only an idiot would give that information if they stole the funds and signed in the people’s names.
9. After a diligent scrutiny, JoyNews Research found discrepancies with 100 out of the 1964 evacuees whose names and signatures the team perused. Some people on this list of 100 appeared twice but with different signatures; some received the 5000 reintegration cedis but did not receive the 500 cedis transportation allowance, while some reported that the money they counted from the envelopes was not up to the 5000 cedis. (I have seen videos in which ministry officials announced the packages openly to evacuees at the airport and said everyone was receiving the same amount. And I wonder whether these people complained when they counted and realised that their envelopes fell short of the 5000 cedis)
The discrepancies detected could result from three possibilities.
10. The first could be genuine clerical errors. For instance, some people’s passport expiration dates were entered as their birth dates, leading to the news that some evacuees would be born in the future.
11. The second could result from misinterpretation by those evaluating the anomalies. For instance, it emerged on Newsfile last Saturday that some evacuees had slept in buses and not in hotels, as provided for in the expenditure breakdown. When the figure for hotel accommodation was given as 142,000 cedis, I realised that that amount (about $12,000) could only accommodate 200 people, if each person’s hotel accommodation cost $60 dollars. So, it’s not a scandal if some people among the 1,964 evacuees did not sleep in hotels.
12. The third possibility is actual wrongdoing or embezzlement. It is possible that some people within the ministry who handled the different aspects of the evacuation could have used dubious means to cheat the process and make money. This is why the JoyNews findings should be given the needed attention.
13. That is why Samuel Okudzeto Ablakwa’s categorical statement that there wasn’t a single ghost name or a single person who did not receive the 5,500 cedis was problematic. The minister may have honestly discharged his duty, but he was not the one who handled the nitty-gritty of the process. He was not the one who counted the money in the envelopes that were handed over to the evacuees. He was not the one who issued the registration forms and took the signatures of the evacuees. And he did not work with angels. In his presentation, the minister should have made room for some margins of error or the possibility of dishonest appropriation by some of the many who handled the process, even if he was sure he didn’t touch a pesewa.
14. The Foreign Affairs Ministry has invited JoyNews to furnish it with its findings for further investigation. The Ministry says it finds the allegations serious and is open to investigating them.
15. Any pesewa that went into the wrong pocket is serious enough to be tracked. If someone stole money thinking the raw data would never be released, the Foreign Affairs Ministry’s commendable transparency and JoyNews Research’s diligent scrutiny and subsequent flagging could expose the wrongdoers.
16. The NPP minority’s call for accountability is too loud to miss. It may be politics as usual, but some of us are taking note. We will remind a future NPP administration and its officials leading the charge today to live up to Ablakwa and the Foreign Affairs Ministry’s standard of transparency.
17. Transparency is the first step of accountability. Even if the minister himself is implicated in this evacuation scrutiny, it should not wash away the exemplary manner in which the ministry opened itself up to scrutiny.
Source: Manasseh Azure Awuni
