Professor Ransford Gyampo of the University of Ghana is asking whom between Professor Kwabena Frimpong-Boateng and Godfred Yeboah Dame to believe in terms of credibility.
The Political Science lecturer’s question come on the back of the Attorney General’s advice to the government on the report provided by the Professor concerning a committee he chaired against illegal mining also known as ‘galamsey’.
Professor Gyampo thinks it is unconscionable for the Attorney-General to suggest the document provided by the Chair of the dissolved Inter-Ministerial Committee on Illegal Mining (IMCIM) contains no evidence to initiate prosecution on those implicated in the report.
“Tell me, between Frimpong-Boateng and the partisanly appointed Godfred Dame, if you put the two side by side, who should Ghanaians believe?” he quizzed on Alfred Ocansey’s The KeyPoints on TV3 Saturday, October 21, 2023.
A former Environment, Science, Innovation and Technology minister, Professor Kwabena Frimpong-Boateng authored a 36-page report titled “Report on the work of IMCIM so far and the way forward,” detailing what was fostering illegal mining (galamsey) in the country and how it could be averted.
The report which was drafted upon a request by the President through the Chief of Staff, Akosua Osei Frema Opare, was readied in March 2021 which received no attention until 2023 when it got leaked in the media.
Contents of the report had it that persons in the ruling party and close to the corridors of power were involved in the act.
However, after the Attorney-General’s study of the report, he advised the government that the document lacked evidence to substantiate any of the claims it contained for prosecution.
Professor went ahead ahead to describe the comment as “a very disrespectful partisan legal advice that in my view shields those expected to be held culpable in an attempt to protect the image of the regime.”
“And I ask myself, what impunity? Respectfully, is Godfred Dame blind? Can’t he see galamsey going on? Is he saying everything in Frimpong Boateng’s report is concocted and that nobody is culpable?,” he quizzed.
According to Prof. Gyampo, the posture of the Attorney-General will affect the fortunes of the New Patriotic Party in the future.
“I think one of the factors working against the future electoral fortunes of this particular NPP government is the penchant for its appointees to insinuate that Ghanaians; we are all dumbs, we are all fools and that we cannot read in-between the lines and so even when we see something as white, they want to tell us that it is black and we must accept what they are telling us. We are not fools, we know what is going on. We can see. Look at these videos (referring to visuals of galamsey activities in many of the forest reserves attached to the report).
