In a letter to President Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo, Chairman of the disbanded Inter-Ministerial Committee on Illegal Mining (IMCIM), Professor Kwabena Frimpong-Boateng, said that Information Minister Kojo Oppong-Nkrumah was plotting to assassinate him.
The purpose of the 37-page report, dated March 19, 2021, submitted by the former minister of environment, science, and technology was to inform the president about the Committee’s efforts to combat illicit mining and the “way forward.”
According to Countryghana, the former minister made a number of accusations in his report against several members of the government and political parties who allegedly tried to obstruct his efforts to crack down on illegal mining.
The Minister for Information is one of the prominent figures named in the report, and Mr. Frimpong Boateng claims that she collected and encouraged a group of journalists to attack him.
“On February 8, 2020, on a Saturday. At the Forest Hotel in Dodowa, Mr. Kojo Oppong-Nkrumah, the Minister for Information, gathered a group of journalists from media organizations connected with the NDC and the NPP to devise a plan to bring me, Kwabena Frimpong-Boateng, down. A journalist in the group called a friend of mine who is also a journalist while they were there and told him about the plot that was being devised. He also warned my friend to keep an eye out for news stories in select newspapers the days after the meeting, according to the article.
Following the aforementioned meeting, the president was informed in a report that several media reports had been made about him and that, in addition, the minister of information had attempted to discredit him in cabinet meetings.
“On Monday, February 10, 2020, the INFORMER Newspaper, whose Editor attended the meeting, ran the following banner headline on its front page: “As if that weren’t enough, on February 13 at the 71st Cabinet Meeting, Mr. Oppong-Nkrumah discussed recent news stories that were trending.
The 500 missing excavators in Frimpong-Boateng were the first items he brought up, according to the former minister.
Prof. Frimpong Boateng claimed in his report that Kojo Oppong Nkrumah and other Committee members obstructed his work.
It should be noted that Mr. Oppong-Nkrumah, in his capacity as Minister for Information, was a member of the IMCIM. He never contacted me to ask what I knew about the “missing excavators,” but for reasons best known to him and his accomplices, he thought it was worthwhile to magnify the falsehood in the press and also present it before Cabinet. If Kojo Oppong-Nkrumah and people like him are interested in running for president, they should do so on the basis of merit rather than trying to discredit a devoted patriot whose only goal is to help Ghana become self-sufficient.
“Oppong-Nkrumah frequently blamed the government’s handling of the “banking crisis and the galamsey fight” for the NPP’s underwhelming showing in the wake of the 2020 general election. The truth is that the hundreds of thousands of residents of the communities adjoining the forests reserves—people who were being harassed by mining corporations like Heritage Imperial—were the ones who did not vote for the NPP in the galamsey areas, not the miners.
Prof. Frimpong Boateng claimed that his retirement from the Science and Technology Ministry was the result of a complex plot by some members of the administration and the New Patriotic Party after being removed from office by President Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo in 2020.
Because of his stance on illegal mining in the nation, he said that some members of the administration wanted him out.