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One of Africa�s misfortunes in the eyes of the rest of the world is the perception that Africans are corrupt, and that African leaders in particular are very corrupt. As one Nigerian journalist is alleged to have said in a BBC interview; �Is corruption a Yoruba word or an Ibo word? The word emanates from the Whiteman�s land so why would they blame us for it?� That the word emanates from the Whiteman�s land does not mean we cannot pick it and perfect it. It does not also mean that the originators of the word did not have a problem with the connotations of what the word corruption means. That African leaders are corrupt is an issue no true African will dispute. The fact also that many of us or almost all of us are direct or indirect beneficiaries of one corrupt act or the other can also not be disputed. In Ghana, the public and civil service have been noted as among the most corrupt institutions in the country. However, these institutions and the people therein have had the luxury of the microscope which navigates to fish out corrupt people always passing them by because there is always an easy prey to be captured by the lenses of the microscope. The politician! What Africa is looking for is an incorruptible leader who would not just have the balls, but two productive balls, I mean PRODUCTIVE BALLS to deal with corruption in all its ramifications. I therefore wished that the disclosure by one of Ghana�s most respected politicians, Mr. Kwame Pianim, a man who was unjustifiably jailed for a crime he has consistently denied he ever committed, and yet bears no grudge against those who inflicted those pains on him, would have been refreshing news. Do we always have to have corrupt leaders or suspect that our leaders are corrupt just because past ones were corrupt? Don�t we deserve honest incorruptible leaders as a people? Or can�t we have a leader who is incorruptible? On the other hand, it is also very worrying for a person with Mr. Kwame Pianim�s stature to issue a clean bill of health for President John Fiifi Atta Mills in the area of corruption on the reasons he has publicly given. His reasons have been described variously as infantile at best and puerile in the worst case. That he, Pianim, on two occasions saw President Mills reject brown envelopes ostensibly being offered him by some nameless persons. Mr. Pianim did not tell us the sizes of the envelopes. You see, we have DHL sizes of envelopes, EMS type and the �Proceed On Leave� type of brown envelopes. In times of old, the �Proceed On Leave� type of envelopes would have had �GGOSS� embossed on it. Oh yes, Government of Ghana on State Service. The Proceed On Leave� type of envelopes, when I was growing up, were also used for something else. Unlike today when JHS pupils can text love messages to their would-be girlfriends or potential boyfriends, we used to write love letters and put them in the �Proceed On Leave� type of envelopes to the girls. For example, we used to write letters like �my dear sunshine, I take the brightness of the day to write you this love missive. Any time I go to bed, I dream about you. When I see you even going to fetch water, then I am dying. I love you 99.99%, please just add ..1% to make it 100%. Try and consider me�. All these letters were put in �Proceed On Leave� envelopes because the letters were not more than five paragraphs. If you were not lucky and the letter found its way into the hands of the girl�s father or any of your teachers, heiiiiiiii, as the Nollywood chaps would say, you are dead. I am sure the envelopes Kwame Pianim saw were not the �Proceed On Leave� type, but DHL or EMS type. He did not also tell us what currencies were in the envelopes, and for what reasons those corrupt officers were there to bribe the President. I am sure the President, having asked the people to �go wey you� with their envelopes, might have told Mr. Pianim who those people were, and why they wanted to bribe him. In any case Mr. Pianim, where were you with the President, his house or his office? If it was in his office, it is obvious that since you were there, or better still since the President was with a visitor in the person of Pianim, his secretary or aides would not have allowed the �bribers� to come to see the President. Did the �bribers�, on seeing you, recognize you as a member of the NPP, and for which reason they would have been very cautious in openly giving the envelopes to the President in your presence? If you were in the house of the President, does the same protocol of visits to the President not apply, such that even when the President had august visitors they could just walk in and transact whatever business they have with the President and walk away just like that? You said it was on two occasions eh? Good, what it means is that although there have been countless number of occasions when some people have visited the President to present him with envelopes; it was only on two occasions that you were there and that the President did not receive the envelopes. Can you be sure of those occasions when you were not there? In any case Kwame, what should motivate any ordinary citizen of this nation, be he a business person or whatever, to gather the courage to go to the President to offer bribes in envelopes if that person has no reason to believe that the President will accept those envelopes? Or better still that others had previously gone to the President to offer envelopes, which were accepted. Kwame, you stated at the forum that �to me if you go to any country where there is corruption, the head is corrupt�. Your exoneration of President Atta-Mills of all forms of corruption therefore means that this country is corruption-free. Is that the case in your own opinion? And you said those acts exhibited by the President in your presence on the two occasions you talked about you did not see in John chapter 1 and John chapter 2. How often did you sit closely in private with the two Johns, and on how many occasions did you see them receiving envelopes from people, contrary to the exemplary life of Egya Atta? Kwame, it is being rumoured that the President intends reshuffling his Ministers and he is considering putting you at the Finance Ministry to replace Dr. Duffuor. Is it what you have been discussing with the President, some of which occasions some tough guys attempted to bribe him? Well some people say that in order for you to gain acceptability from the NDC, you need to do P.R work for the President, and by extension for the NDC. I hope that is not true because the kind of image you have built for yourself in this country, if you are found to be stooping that low for political position, it may not be long before you may be heard saying �reputation, reputation, I have soiled my reputation�. By all means we need a decent incorruptible leader to help at least reduce the levels of corruption in both public and private life, but any act of adulation and praise singing which is symptomatic of sycophancy and bootlicking will not help this nation. Kwame, if you present your findings and conclusions to any supervisor for marking I am not too sure you will have any serious mark. You might have taken a good look at those who attempted to bribe the President; we will organize an identification parade and invite you to identify those criminals for investigations and prosecutions, as part of the national agenda for fighting corruption. A national agenda which allows those who offer bribes to Presidents to go free, whether the bribes were received in the case of John Chapter 1 and John Chapter 2, or were not received in the case of John Chapter 3 will not help this country deal with this critical issue of corruption. When a President presides over corrupt greedy bastards of Ministers, how clean can that President be? Kwame can be a key witness in this case, but you cannot know more in the government of Prof. Atta Mills than Ex President J.J Rawlings who openly says the Atta-Mills government is corrupt.