Elizabeth Ohene writes: Hiding secrets in plain sight
Within a one- hour period last Saturday, I had received the now famous link to the website of a Norwegian newspaper from five different people. That was my introduction to the story about a contract for a power plant that our Ministry of Power has entered into and which has many troubling questions.
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It has been fascinating trying to follow the story as it has unfolded and trying to note which part of the story interests which section of our society.
The first question that I asked was; Why had it taken a Norwegian newspaper and their two journalists to break the story? The answer to that question appears quite early in their story.
They were following the adventures of someone they call “the man from Oslo” (Oslo being the capital of their country) who they accuse of being a serial fraudster. Umar Farooq Zahoor is the name of the man they are pursuing and he sounds a colourful man; a Pakistani-Norwegian, whose Pakistani parents had migrated to Norway.
The journalists had tracked their man from his exploits in Oslo to Switzerland and onto Dubai, which is where the Ghana angle enters the story and the story suddenly gets curiouser and curiouser.
Where are our journalists?
Since I entered frontline politics I had come to think that the politician part of me had overtaken and dominated the journalist in me. But the question I asked when I reached the part of the story at which my heart began to quicken was where our journalists were. If the politician part of me had been on the ascendancy, I would surely have asked where the members of my party in Parliament were when such a contract was brought to the House.
The first thing that should have rung alarm bells was when the Ameri Agreement was brought to Parliament by a waiver of Standing Order 80 (1). As I recall it, one of the first rules drummed into the head of every young journalist in the coverage of Parliament is to be on the lookout whenever something is brought to the House under a certificate of emergency, or whenever, as in this case, Standing Order 80 (1) is waived. This Order 80 (1) states: “No Motion shall be debated until at least, 48 hours have elapsed between the date on which notice of the Motion is given and the date on which the Motion is moved”.
Here we are in Ghana, enduring dumsor for three years plus and a minister brings an agreement to Parliament that cannot wait for 48 hours to be debated. Any journalist worth his salt would immediately know that this is an agreement that would require extra scrutiny.
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When the politicians have finished rushing it through because none of them wants to be accused of delaying the cure for the suffering of the people by insisting on the 48- hour period elapsing before the debate, the journalist would now subject it to the needed scrutiny.
Interesting Pakistani-Norwegian man
The politician is allowed and indeed, is expected to see the good in everyone or at least pretend that he does, but the journalist is allowed and expected to be suspicious of everybody. A journalist with a minimum amount of curiosity, would find the man from Oslo, a Pakistani-Norwegian, interesting and one thing would lead to another on the net and some of the colourful backgrounds of Mr Umaru Farook Zahoor would have been uncovered by a Ghanaian journalist.
Our curious Ghanaian journalist, if such an animal exists, would then probably have “intercepted”, to borrow a Ghanaian phrase, the triumphant press release issued by the Greek company METKA in September. The Ghanaian public would have heard that the agreement our government signed with Ameri Group had been subcontracted out to METKA and the figures in their press release would have set some alarm bells ringing.
Unfortunately the Norwegian journalists did all the work for us and all of us Ghanaian journalists have been left scrambling to get a handle on the story.
Why did we in Ghana miss a story that was staring us in the face? I was recently asked to lend whatever weight I might have to a campaign for the passing of the Freedom of Information Bill. I declined the invitation for two reasons: I don’t have any weight and I am not persuaded that we have a problem of journalists being unable to find out what is happening because of secrecy on the part of officialdom. There are no secret documents worth bothering about. We do not need any special keys to access all the things hidden in plain sight.
Questions about the agreement
Since the Norwegian newspaper broke this story, it has been instructive the sheer quality and volume of information that there is on power and which is now being packaged in a manner that can be understood by the average person.
This story certainly becomes far sexier, as we say in the trade, when someone traces the beginning of the saga to President Mahama’s State of the Nation address where he talks about a power agreement being negotiated and it turns out the agreement had been signed two weeks earlier. Then it turns out that the local companies that are in this deal with Ameri Group/METKA are Engineers and Planners, which just happens to belong to the brother of the President and Amandi of STL fame.
And yet none of us got excited about this agreement until a Norwegian newspaper hit us in the face. A clear case, if ever there was, of hiding things in plain sight until it rots and the stench overcomes us all. We who are politicians and journalists have no hiding place.
All the juicy bits about this story come from public records, such as the Hansard. I wonder how many people ever read the Hansard, which happens to be the best hiding place for all government secrets.
If newsrooms in the country wouldn’t make the reading of the Hansard obligatory, maybe they might think of making the reading of foreign newspapers such as Norwegian or Austrian, compulsory for their staff. Foreign newspapers are making a habit of breaking stories about Ghana that are missed by those of us who live here. That is probably what happens when you hide things in plain sight.