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A report by the Chairman of the dissolved Inter-Ministerial Committee on Illegal Mining (IMCIM), Professor Kwabena Frimpong-Boateng to President Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo has cited Information Minister, Kojo Oppong-Nkrumah as scheming to run him down.
The 37-page report filed by the former Minister for Environment, Science and Technology dated March 19, 2021, was to brief the president about the work of the Committee in its fight against illegal mining and the “way forward.”
As sighted by GhanaWeb, the former minister in his report made several allegations against some government and political party officials who made various attempts to thwart his efforts in clamping down on illegal mining.
One of the big names indicted in the report is the Minister for Information who according to Mr Frimpong Boateng gathered and incited a team of journalists to attack him.
“On Saturday the 8th of February 2020. Mr. Kojo Oppong-Nkrumah, the Minister for Information assembled a group of journalists from both NDC and NPP-affiliated media houses at the Forest Hotel in Dodowa to discuss a strategy to bring me Kwabena Frimpong-Boateng down. Whilst they were there a journalist from among the group called a friend of mine, also a journalist, and informed him about the plot that was being hatched. He further informed my friend to watch out for headlines in some newspapers in the days following the meeting,” he stated in the report.
Subsequent to the said meeting, the report to the president captured that various stories were published in the media against his person and that beyond that, the minister for information sought to run him down during cabinet meetings.
“On Monday, 10′ February 2020, the INFORMER Newspaper, whose Editor was at the meeting had the Banner Headline on its front page as reproduced below:
“As if that was not enough on Thursday, 13th February 2020 at the 71st Cabinet Meeting, Mr. Oppong-Nkrumah in his regular report to Cabinet talked about news that was trending in the week.
“The first thing he mentioned was Frimpong-Boateng and 500 missing excavators,” the former minister said.
As part of his report, Prof. Frimpong Boateng alleged that some members of the Committee including Kojo Oppong Nkrumah sabotaged his work.
“It must be noted that Mr. Oppong-Nkrumah, as Minister for Information, was a member of the IMCIM and he never called me to find out what I knew about ‘missing excavators’ but he found it worthwhile to magnify it in press and also present the falsehood before Cabinet for reasons best known to him and his co-conspirators. If Kojo Oppong-Nkrumah and the likes of him have presidential ambitions they should pursue it on merit and not attempt to destroy a hard working patriot, whose only ambition is work to achieve a Ghana Beyond Aid,” the report captured.
“After the 2020 general election, Oppong-Nkrumah on many occasions attributed the below expectation performance of the NPP to the Government’s management of the ‘banking crisis and the galamsey fight’. The fact is that those who did not vote for the NPP in the galamsey areas were not the miners but rather the hundreds of thousands of people living in the communities bordering the forests reserves, who were being harassed by mining companies such as Heritage Imperial,” he added.
Following his removal from office by President Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo in 2020, Prof. Frimpong Boateng disclosed that his exit from the Science and Technology Ministry was a grand scheme orchestrated by some elements in the government and the New Patriotic Party.
According to him there were people in government that wanted him out because of his stance on illegal mining activities in the country.
Read Prof. Frimpong Boateng’s full report to President Akufo-Addo below:
