A private legal practitioner, Austin Kwabena Brako-Powers, has cautioned that reducing the Electricity Company of Ghana (ECG)’s missing container scandal to the usual political debate will not yield results.
He said all the major scandals, which were reduced to a blame game between the dominant political parties, the governing National Democratic Congress (NDC) and the opposition New Patriotic Party (NPP), had yet to be resolved in the public interest.
“If we want to get to the bottom of this disastrous scandal and truly protect the public purse, we need to immediately end the current ragging blame game between the NDC and the NPP. Like many others before it, this unpatriotic debate won’t get us anywhere,” Mr Brako-Powers said.
The Energy Minister, John Jinapor, has reported that over 1,300 containers belonging to the Electricity Company of Ghana are missing at the Tema Port.
These containers contain cables the country’s power distributor has imported from India to undertake its activities.
The Ministry and National Security have traced 40 of the missing containers to a warehouse at Kpone reportedly owned by an Indian national.
There is an ongoing battle on traditional and social media, with members of the NDC and NPP blaming one another for the ECG container scandal.
Reacting to the blame game, private legal practitioner Austin Kwabena Brako-Powers said such a discussion does not “benefit the taxpayer whose money was used to procure the goods in the container.”
“I will recommend we put on an apolitical approach if we are desirous of resolving this mystery that happened at the Tema Port in front of security and port officials employed to protect the national interest,” the lawyer said.
Mr Brako-Powers wants the government to prosecute anyone found to have played various roles in the missing ECG containers.
“This issue is scandalous in the first place, and to think that containers that are under the supervision of security and port officials have gone missing makes the whole country look like a crime scene with innocent Ghanaians at the mercy of merciless, corrupt, and unpatriotic politicians,” he said in an interview with 3news.com on Monday March 31.
