The Second Vice Chairman of the New Patriotic Party (NPP), Henry Nana Boakye, popularly known as Nana B, has denied allegations that he pressured Foreign Affairs Minister Samuel Okudzeto Ablakwa to allow him to retain a service passport.
He described the allegations as baseless, insisting that he never asked to retain the document.
The allegations were raised by the Majority Caucus on Parliament’s Foreign Affairs Committee, which accused the Bosome Freho MP, Nana Asafo-Adjei Ayeh, of attempting to persuade the minister to make an exception for Mr Boakye.
Addressing the media on Tuesday, October 13, the Salaga South MP, Hajia Zuwera Mohammed Ibrahimah, alleged that Mr Asafo-Adjei Ayeh and Mr Boakye had sought to persuade the minister to allow the NPP executive to retain a service passport bearing the number SS-003454.
She said Mr Ablakwa rejected the request, maintaining that Mr Boakye’s former positions as NPP National Youth Organiser and Board Chairman of the National Food Buffer Stock Company did not qualify him to retain the passport.
However, speaking in an interview with Sammie Wiafe on Citi FM’s Eyewitness News on Thursday, October 15, Mr Boakye said he had previously held a service passport because of his public appointments as Deputy Executive Director of the National Service Authority and Board Chairman of the Ghana Buffer Stock Company.
He denied asking to retain the passport, saying his contact with the minister concerned a request to transfer an active United States visa in the service passport to his ordinary passport.
“I never requested a service passport. It is just an outright falsehood, total fabrication. I never requested that I should retain my service passport. Never,” he said.
Mr Boakye explained that he had contacted Mr Ablakwa to seek authorisation for the transfer and had asked Mr Asafo-Adjei Ayeh to submit the service passport on his behalf.
“I called Okudzeto myself personally, and I said, ‘Minister, please, I have an active visa in the service passport. It was a US visa, and it is a prevailing practice. So please kindly give me authorisation to the US Embassy so that I can transfer that visa into my ordinary passport,’” he said.
According to Mr Boakye, the minister asked him to make a formal written request. He later abandoned the process after considering the bureaucratic steps involved.
“I realised that, look, this is going to take a whole bureaucratic process. I’m now supposed to write to the ministry, you’re supposed to go to this office. It will enter this office. Somebody will have to stamp it before this letter will come, and it will be delayed,” he explained.
He said he instead opted to apply for a new visa using his ordinary passport.
“So, you know what? Let me just disregard that process and let me use my ordinary passport to apply for a new visa, and that is it. So I actually abandoned this process,” he added.
Mr Boakye questioned why he would seek to retain the passport, given the President’s directive for former government appointees to surrender their diplomatic or service passports.
“The President says that all former government appointees should hand over their diplomatic or service passports. So why would I, an opposition national organiser, then seek to retain my service passport? I mean, this is unthinkable,” he said.
He also accused Mr Ablakwa of engaging in diversionary tactics following the Minority’s scrutiny of documents relating to the evacuation of some Ghanaians from South Africa, during which the Minority said it had identified discrepancies.
Mr Boakye described the press conference by Hajia Zuwera Mohammed Ibrahimah as “infantile” and rejected the allegations against him.
The Majority Caucus had linked the alleged passport request to what it described as persistent personal attacks on Mr Ablakwa by Mr Asafo-Adjei Ayeh, warning against the use of parliamentary oversight to pursue personal interests.
