“He didn’t even sit in the room,” Kwakye Ofosu defends Mahama on Damang deal
There is a version of the Damang Mine story that has taken hold in public conversation, one where President John Mahama quietly tilted the scales in favour of his brother’s company, Engineers & Planners, ensuring it walked away with one of Ghana’s most significant mining concessions without much of a fight. Felix Kwakye Ofosu wants Ghanaians to know that version is not just wrong, but backwards.
The government spokesperson and Abura Asebu-Kwamankese MP sat down on PM Express Monday with host Evans Mensah and made an argument that few in his position would have the nerve to frame so boldly, that the President, rather than engineering his brother’s success, was the single person who made the entire process harder for Ibrahim Mahama’s company to win.
“On the contrary, I will argue that the biggest obstacle to E&P taking that mine was the President,” he said.
It starts with a detail Kwakye Ofosu says the public has not paid enough attention to. When the Lands and Natural Resources Minister brought the question of the expiring Damang lease before Cabinet, the President was not there. Not because something came up. Not because he was travelling. He chose to leave.
“At the Cabinet meeting that considered that particular matter of the Damang mining lease, the President recused himself. He did not sit in that meeting,” Kwakye Ofosu said.
The reason, he explained, was straightforward: Mahama did not want even the appearance of a conflict of interest hanging over a decision that touched his brother’s business interests. The Vice President took the chair in his place, and Cabinet carried on without him. According to Kwakye Ofosu, this was not a one-time gesture either. Every time the Damang issue came up, Mahama walked out of the room.
“Because he believed that it was an ethical thing to do, because we did not want the situation where it would appear that he was superintending the decision-making involving an entity that his brother had an interest in,” he said, responding to Evans Mensah’s question about why the President kept stepping aside.
But the recusal is only part of what Kwakye Ofosu is putting on the table. The other part concerns what Cabinet did once Mahama was out of the room, and it is, by the spokesperson’s own admission, unusual for Ghana.
Rather than simply handing the Damang concession to Engineers & Planners through a direct allocation, which he says would have been perfectly within the government’s power to do, Cabinet demanded a competitive bidding process. Companies would have to come to the table and make their case. E&P would have to earn it.
“I think we will struggle to find an instance where a competitive process has been used to award the lease of a mining concession in Ghana,” Kwakye Ofosu said.
He pressed the point further: “When the minister came, the Cabinet records will show that the Cabinet insisted that a competitive process be used to select which company gets it.”
The message underneath that statement is deliberate. If the government had wanted to quietly deliver the mine to Ibrahim Mahama’s company, there was a well-worn, entirely conventional path to do exactly that, one that required no public scrutiny and raised no procedural eyebrows. They did not take it.
“We could simply have handed over to E&P without any competitive process, but Cabinet insisted that the competitive process be used,” he stated.
Kwakye Ofosu was equally pointed in addressing how Cabinet itself functioned during these deliberations. The image of ministers nodding along to whatever the President wanted, an image implicit in the allegations against Mahama, does not match what he says actually happened inside that room.
“The debate at Cabinet that day was rigorous. People voiced their views frankly, without fear or favour,” he said. “There was no rubber-stamp decision at that place.”
He noted that the committee which oversaw the competitive process later gave a public account of its work, including explanations for why certain bidders succeeded and others did not. Parliament, he added, will still get its own crack at the lease agreement when it comes up for ratification, meaning the oversight is far from over.
“The President was not part of the decision-making and did not stampede the process,” Kwakye Ofosu said.
He saved his sharpest line for last, one that doubles as both a concession and a counter-attack.
“If you say that the President handed over to his brother, I would even agree that the President was the biggest stumbling block to E&P’s acquisition of the Damang Mine.”
It is the kind of statement that is designed to stop an argument cold. Kwakye Ofosu is not just defending the President from a charge of favouritism. He is making the case that the very structures Mahama put in place, the recusals, the insistence on competition, the Cabinet deliberations he refused to sit in on, amount to evidence of the opposite. That if anyone made life difficult for Engineers & Planners in the race for Damang, it was the President himself.
Whether that argument lands will depend largely on how much trust Ghanaians are willing to extend to the account of a government spokesperson. But the version Kwakye Ofosu is telling is at least a coherent one, and one the government clearly intends to keep telling.
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