The pressure of locating funds to lubricate the creaking wheels of the National Democratic Congress war chariots in this most decisive of campaigns, has driven professor John Evans Atta Mills up the creek, and flung him Southerly, to Southern Africa from where he returned over the weekend after nearly three weeks ensconced with his nephew, Kojo Mills, 39, the Chief Executive of the multi-billion-rand Shanduka Group, a gargantuan money black empowerment vehicle.
With the issue of his health masking part of his problems, the otherwise agile hockey enthusiast, Professor Mills,64, is at his tethers end as almost all local avenues for cash seem to have dried up. Avenues for funding everywhere are closing either due to Osafo Maafo - BaahWiredu’s fiscal anti-inflationary measures, or tight economic husbandry, there appears to be a consensus, even among the NPP business men that under the NDC, business was good as money was plentiful. One needed marginally exert one’s self to see cash cascading in a certain direction.
Contractors, particularly roads sector construction contractors, who used to donate heavily on the NDC cause, have done a volte-face. Others have genuinely fallen on bad times as NDC contractors who thrived under the NDC Government are now broke or converted to NPP. ‘Being in opposition is hell’, Spio Garbrah is quoted to have said in one of his more frank admissions in public, until he landed a well paid international job with the International telecommunications organisation, after seeing that his communications company, Spio Garbrah and Associates, was going nowhere.
Now, key candidates are demanding evidence of funds in place before putting down names of candidates in key electoral areas where the NDC have already perfected strategies to seize back seats they narrowly lost to the NPP in the Western, Central and even Northern region. For the NDC, the shortage of funds in almost every department, has hobbled the almost invincible impressive war machine honed for battle, making it bereft of the capacity to go for miles without fuel, but relying on pure grit.
IC QUAYE REFRAIN
Almost two terms out of power, and going on to a third, outside the enervating comfort zone of power, with Sheik IC Quaye, humming swear words into their ears - Prof ebaa power wo, ebaa power da …. Mini Prof kee,,,,,ekee... Kenya…ebaa nya .. The insult from Quaye and sundry elements within the NPP is unbearable…, the drivers are all too primed to blow up.
It has become an overarching burden on Mills now! - every one within the NDC expects Mills to find the money to carry on. His most ardent and loyal aides are now impercunious, the Ahwoi brothers who were prime backers leaning on their fine little sumptuous earners at Cocobod and Agricultural Development Bank (ADB) virtually wiped out now. Mr. Kwesi Ahwoi, the more resourceful of the Ahwoi brothers carrying on with a wing and a prayer, but preferring to stay outside politics.
Mr. Kwamena Ahwoi, the most ideologically positive one is also hanging on to his teaching job at GIMPA, whiles Ato Ahwoi is scratching proudly, sporting a dislocated backbone, and wearing a bold face which masks the pangs of hunger. Out of the band of loyal strong men in the Mills’ camp, another fellow Fanteman from Saltpond Mr. Kofi Totobi Quakyi, the former national security minister, is now too ill to play any starring role apart from his own problems with the founder of the party Flt. Lt. Rawlings, who thinks that Totobi outfoxed in the fight to enthrone democratic rule in Ghana, and fought to hand over power to the declared victor, the NPP’s John Agyekum Kufour.
ORIGINAL WASHè
It is now left with only Mr. ET Mensah, the only original member of the Mills group still standing at 61, but now even having to draw closer to his wife of his youth as a player for the Academicals, Ms.Vida Aryeetey. ET stays at the comfortable East Legon bricks and mortar investments of Vida’s near Kufuor’s house, not daring to stray beyond the walls else…
Mills rightly feels the pressure of finding money to keep the NDC walking. The other lady powerhouse who was behind the Mills cause, Mrs. Faustina Nelson has since left the group and thrown her lot with the DFP, too tired she says to go into mainstream politics. To the NDC, she says never again!
INSCRUTABLE PROF.
The pressure of money is really on Mills. With the inscrutable face of an associate professor of tax law, through his tenure as internal revenue commissioner, his sojourn in Canada as a fellow at a Canadian Universtiy, life has not really dealt the 64 year old native of Ekumfi with any of the good fortunes that usually go with such a lofty office. So when he had the ‘gift of the gods’ bestowed upon him as a presidential candidate, the heavenly hand that dealt him such good fortune - the Swedru declaration- left out the corresponding talent of resourcefulness to make the gift altogether wholesome.
President Rawlings reckoned that, surely after such a gift that so clearly cost him his faithful longstanding friends - Goozie Tanoh, Kyeretwie Opoku, Larry Adjetey , Kwesi Botchwey, Obed Asamoah among others, being resourceful enough to drum up some dollars would be the easy part.
The Old man was woefully wrong.
From disaster in 2001, to another disaster in 2004, the NDC dug deep in all its elements and willed itself to pull together, and give professor Atta Mills a final chance to cut it with them. That explains the extraordinary showing of last year’s Congress when Jerry Rawlings himself, run out of the milk of human patience and decided to stay out of the fray. According to Alhaji Bature of Mcbonalds, now with HOT FM in a surprising frank discussion with the Chronicle last year, and this is confirmed by still more equally honest talk with other key loyalists, Hon Moses Asaga and Takoradi’s parliamentary candidate and now a Tema constituency chairman and former GPHA’s Captain Cudjoe.
Mills magical endorsement of over 80 percent plus endorsement is not a figure to be trifled with when compared with that of the incumbent New Patriotic Party whose new comparatively charismatic leader who now squares up with an older more horizontal heavyweight that Mills has had to spar with. Not to forget the very formal proper, CPP candidate and the usual serial presidential candidate of the People’s National Convention. mong Mills’ bothersome downsides has been his troubling gift to ‘unmake’ money. Try as he would, his brain would not catch fire with money making ideas, or dazzle with an investor’s brain wave, or crackle into a dream merchants bull strike, seeming to be condemned to the classroom and not the politicians den which demands the resourcefulness of an Obama or a Nana Addo.
SMART ALEC KOJO MILLS, LYNCHPIN
It used to be the occasional visit to South Africa, a parcel here, vehicles there, and now suddenly it has assumed the main watering hole for the next crucial stage of the the NDC’s campaign. Mills now has had to apply considerable pressure on his nephew to fund him, a development which had once caught the attention of Kojo Mills’ boss, the mercurial billionaire who had played a fatherly role for some years now and who now sits atop his huge rand - spinning colossus, the Shaduka Group, Mr. Cyril Ramaphosa.
Easily the most charismatic figure to come out of South Africa after Steve Biko, he is a magical character who has managed to burnish an already swanky image despite his high profile falling out with President Thabo Mbeki, four years ago, when he was embroiled in a coup allegation in South Africa. To his good fortune he still has a special place in the heart of the Madiba, the only person next to God that South Africans swear to - Nelson Rowilla Mandela. Cyril was the preferred candidate for President seven years ago.
Still at a relatively youthful age of 54, he has time on his hands to let 2009 go, as he cranks up his vast money machine, before he makes a bid for the Presidency in 2012, when he will still be under 60. His company is among the very top mining and investment vehicles in South Africa, Shanduka Group. On top of this vehicle is the beady eyed yellow young man from Ghana who graduated in Economics from George Washington University and holds an MBA from Harvard University. After doing his bit on Wall street for some time, cutting his teeth with a couple of investment houses in the New York, Kojo, whose mum is an African American, worked with DLJeanette, before taking a ticket to South Africa to work on a joint Venture deal with DLJ.
When the work was over, he jumped ship and found comfort with Cyril Ramaphosa. With the good fortune of meeting Mr. Ramaphosa, he soon made him his Managing Director of the investment wing of Shanduka Group, and Acting CEO of the conglomerate, The Shanduka Group. Shanduka Group is a labyrinthine organisation that primarily owns major companies and has major interests and minor stakes in 500 other companies from Chile to Namibia, through Australia to United Kingdom.
Previously known as Millennium Consolidated Investments, Shanduka owns several food companies, like First-for-Food Services, ACME, Adcock Ingram Holdings, African Mineral Diamond Exploration, Airport Logistics Property Handling, Guardrisk, Helios Towers, and seven different services all under the Alexander Forbes signature plus a 70 percent stake in Alexander Forbes Insurance company. The list is endless as Chronicle tracks such diverse companies as Bidvest and Bluebor, all within the empire of Ramaphosa who sits on the international boards of Coca Cola, Standard Bank and Unilever. Though Governance criteria within South Africa is pretty high, political donations is pretty rough having being recipients of political capital in the past, particularly Sweden and Norway which funded the ANC while in exile.
The ANC Government approach to such issues has been lax, but it is in Ghana, under the political parties law, that Kojo will have a problem shifting a pile in the direction of his uncle if and when he decides to. The difference lies in the country of origin of the donation, ‘is it a foreign company?’ ……
But Jojo Mills will be wary about the tightrope he has to navigate in his almost certain push for his uncle, but he has countless avenues for diverting funds to any source he chooses. He can choose to use the travel and tour company to launder money to Mills and that is not impossible to execute, will he or will he not? At last year’s congress to elect a flagbearer, Jojo was present, and playing on his anonymity, Chronicle shadowed him sporting party colours over his plain white pants and shirt as he mingled with party men, going ahead to steal a conversation with the founder. South Africa is not the only place that Mills is banking on. The biggest fundraiser is without doubt Jerry Rawlings. He is an asset that the party is hoping to draw on at the same time trying to avoid - because it comes at a price. Control. Kai! kai, kai, kai! -
Source: GNA
