John Boadu & Wontumi Must Shut UP!

Recent developments within the ruling New Patriotic Party (NPP) seem to buttress the belief that not everyone carrying a big political tag is politically smart.

The party’s government, which is currently ‘choking’ with one embarrassing scandal after the other, is unfortunately not being helped by people holding sensitive positions.

Last week, when the ‘Contracts For Sale’ exposé broke, everyone expected that, at least for once, party apparatchiks would leave the man at the middle of the scandal, Agyenim Boateng Ajei, to carry his own cross, so government would not be seen as trying to cover anybody.

The President did his bit by suspending him and reporting his conduct to the Office of the Special Prosecutor and the Commission on Human Rights and Administrative Justice (CHRAJ). At the same time, the Minister of Information, Kojo Oppong Nkrumah, had been trying to manage the mess so the ‘abscess’ doesn’t spread wider than it ought to, even though the opposition National Democratic Congress (NDC) is doing its best to rope in government at all cost.

It is for this reason that we at THE NEW PUBLISHER think there is no wisdom in what the party’s general secretary, Mr. John Boadu, said in an interaction with the media.

“When did selling of contracts become a crime? Buying a contract from a contractor who cannot execute it isn’t a crime,” he reportedly asked.

Even though Mr. Boadu may be merely trying to bare his mind, regarding which aspect of the case is legal and which is not, we think he would have served his party best if he had remained silent. What he said has, at best, put the party in a worse light that when he did not speak to the media.

One other person who has never helped the NPP with his media pronouncements is the Ashanti Regional Chairman, Bernard Antwi-Boasiako, aka Chairman Wontumi.

He said that the NPP meddled in the recent NDC parliamentary primaries by pumping money into some constituencies, through the delegates. He even boasted that he had a hand in the defeat of the Kumbungu MP, Ras Mubarak.

Here too the paper disagrees with Wontumi that money answers all things. In our view, even if NPP actually had a hand in the outcome of the NDC primaries, was it politically smart to have boasted about it in the media, barely three days after the primaries?

Embarrassingly, no sooner had Wontumi spoken to the media than the party officially distanced itself from the claims.

The NPP’s Director of Communications and MP for the Adentan Constituency, Yaw Buaben Asamoa, categorically rubbished Wontumi’s claims, saying: “As far as the New Patriotic Party at the national level is concerned, there is no such thing. We don’t have any such interest in any manipulation or otherwise.”

With this counter claims by the party, the question is, who in the NPP do we take serious?

This is why people at the top must be measured in what they say, and when they say it.

A sage once said: “If you have nothing to say, don’t come and say it here”.