<<Print>>

Top guns of the National Democratic Congress (NDC) claim he is not a member of their party, but that he has only been planted to destroy the party through his role as Operations Director of the Friends of Nana Konadu Agyeman-Rawlings (FONKAR), but Ernest Owusu-Bempah says he helped then candidate and now President John Evans Atta Mills with a whopping $40,000 for his 2008 campaign. According to him, he used his business associates in the United Kingdom to raise and contribute the said amount for the 2008 campaign of the NDC. Apart from that, Owusu-Bempah, who was speaking in an interview with Daily Guide, said he also used the same means to print out not less than 20,000 T-shirts to help the campaign, alongside other communication strategies he offered for the candidate to succeed. He alleged that �a white man (broni fitaa)� donated the cash and T-shirts. Though the Chairman of the UK/Ireland branch of the NDC, Horace Nii Ankrah, has disputed his claim of being a member of the party, Owusu-Bempah said at the time, he was not only a professional but a practicing journalist in the UK and could not have declared his political inclination. Nonetheless, he said, �I�m a Ghanaian and I have a political affiliation, so I say that I am an NDC activist and a strong believer of Jerry John Rawlings and the wife.� The Konadu boy also had cause to dispute claims in sections of the media that he was a drug peddler and a member of the New Patriotic Party (NPP) who has been planted in the NDC to destroy the ruling party, asking rhetorically: �How does one become a member of a political party when politics is all about votes and getting people to become active members of the party?� He has referred the matter to his lawyers, he said. Owusu-Bempah stated that his only relation with the NPP is the fact that the late Finance Minister, Kwadwo Baah Wiredu was his uncle and sought to know whether that alone could qualify him as a member of the NPP. That notwithstanding, he said �the onus is on them (his accusers) to come out and prove the allegation that they leveled against me�, asking DAILY GUIDE to cross-check from the NPP headquarters whether he is a member of the party. Owusu-Bempah alleged that these and other speculations are being peddled against him and other members of FONKAR and the Konadu campaign team �as part of a grand agenda by a group of people at the Presidency, spearheaded by Koku Anyidoho, Communications Director at the Presidency, who has paid money to a group of journalists to go out there to malign and then destroy my credibility. �The preamble is that Owusu-Bempah is one of the leading members of FONKAR who spearheaded activities right from the word go. I am the Director of Operations for FONKAR and therefore if anything at all dents him with some series of allegations because he is the heartbeat of FONKAR so that they can destroy my credibility (sic)�, he emphasized. According to him, these machinations began with him being inundated with phone calls from unknown numbers and anonymous persons threatening to kill him. So far, the Konadu boy said he has received not less than seven of such death threats from strange persons. In spite of all these and other schemes, Owusu-Bempah noted, �It will never work. That will not deter me from pushing the agenda to make Nana Konadu Agyeman-Rawlings to become the flagbearer of the party.� �They think that Owusu-Bempah is the loud-mouth and he is giving them a bitter pill that they cannot swallow. So the only way they can go about is to destroy him so that they can get hold of Nana Konadu Agyeman Rawlings and destroy her campaign,� he asserted. With confidence he noted: �Nana Konadu Agyeman-Rawlings is a candidate who is capable. She is ready to win the flagbearership of the party based on the message that she has given and put across to the delegates which they are buying, being spearheaded by the FONKAR team.� In any case, he said, Konadu is winning on the ground and that is why the Mills camp has become petrified, confused and uncomfortable; hence resorting to what he described as �gutter politics and character assassination to suit their whims and caprices�. Attempts to get comments from Koku Anyidoho, and spokesman for the Rawlingses, Kofi Adams, to get their side of the story, proved futile since both individuals did not answer their phones.