President John Dramani Mahama exhibited carelessness in accepting the much-criticized\u00a0Ford Expedition gift, from a Burkinabe contractor, according to the Executive Director of IMANI Ghana, Franklin Cudjoe.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe president was careless in receiving the gift,\u201d Mr. Cudjoe said. But he also criticized the government setup that allowed indiscriminate access to the President making him susceptible to such gift giving.<\/p>\n
[contextly_sidebar id=”Ie4oaTgSU1C40aUyorvPQVcIME8RAhEO”]The Burkinabe contractor in question, Djibril Kanazoe, has been accused of bribing President John Mahama with the expensive vehicle in an attempt to win a bid to execute a road construction project.<\/p>\n
Djibril Kanazoe, admitted giving\u00a0President Mahama a Ford Expedition vehicle, for which the President called to thank him.<\/p>\n
‘The structures have to be looked at’<\/strong><\/p>\n This issue notwithstanding,\u00a0Franklin Cudjoe asserted that the bigger problem of the government setup ought to be assessed because “until we do, the gift-giving issues won’t end\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cThis is Africa, every village chief, fetish priest, linguist who dies, people want to come to the president and tell the president; he is dead, can we do this? When you are president and the type of presidential monarch we have in his part of the world because the constitution makes them Captain Planet, everybody wants to come to the president to do something,\u201d Mr. Cudjoe explained on Cit FM’s<\/strong> news analysis programme,\u00a0The Big Issue<\/strong>.<\/p>\n \u201cWe should look at exactly how we are set up as a government, as a state, because this thing [gift giving] will not end today, it won\u2019t end tomorrow… the structures have to be looked at,\u201d the IMANI boss stated.<\/p>\n President should have said no<\/strong><\/p>\n Despite this, Mr. Cudjoe maintained that President Mahama acted carelessly and he felt the President should have just said no to the gift.<\/p>\n He\u00a0suggested that the President \u201cprobably didn\u2019t even know that this was going to get nasty\u201d but he ought to have known that \u201csomebody giving a gift of that magnitude possibly wants something.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cI am saying careless because he just assumed that this is a gift he is giving us, and probably we are good friends but these things have a way of boomeranging and so that is the point I am making,\u201d Mr. Cudjoe concluded.<\/p>\n –<\/p>\n By: Delali Adogla-Bessa\/citifmonline.com\/Ghana<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" President John Dramani Mahama exhibited carelessness in accepting the much-criticized\u00a0Ford Expedition gift, from a Burkinabe contractor, according to the Executive Director of IMANI Ghana, Franklin Cudjoe. \u201cThe president was careless in receiving the gift,\u201d Mr. Cudjoe said. But he also criticized the government setup that allowed indiscriminate access to the President making him susceptible to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":14,"featured_media":221812,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[10,11],"tags":[],"yoast_head":"\n