“People around Mahama begged me to release the ford gift expose i did on him”- Manasseh Azure Awuni
Manasseh Azure Awuni, an investigative journalist, claims that during the presidency of John Dramani Mahama, a friend pleaded with him to postpone the publication of the infamous Ford bribery scandal until after the 2016 elections.
Manasseh, without naming faces, said the approach was made with the understanding that if he moved forward, Mahama’s re-election bid would collapse.
When he appeared on the state broadcaster GTV’s TV talk show Moomen Tonight on Wednesday evening, he was discussing the broader topic of bribery approaches he has got in the course of his career.
GhanaWeb monitored more remarks on the solution to drop the Ford bribery controversy against the citizen of John Dramani Mahama, stressing that he had earned bribery overtures but had never obtained a bribe.
“…if you read the Fourth John, I said that before I came out with the Ford Scandal, I encountered a friend from the White House who said, ‘We have done our estimates, and we know that if this news breaks at this moment, we will not withstand this election.’
“However, if it had been some other journalist, we would not have had any problems so how much would they demand that we could not afford? But we know that no sum of money can make you change your mind, so we are pleading with you.”
He went on to say that a suggestion was made that he have some dirt on the then-main opposition leader and current president, Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo, so that the National Democratic Congress could retaliate if the New Patriotic Party threatened him during the campaign over the Ford saga.
“(My acquaintance added that) we know Akufo-Addo often goes to Nigeria for campaign funds, so why do not you add it so that when they target us, we can also attack them,” he said, but Manasseh denied what he called false equivalence.
“Those (bribe) attempts have been made many times,” he said, “but I can assure you that after I began investigating GYEEDA, I have never taken a pesewa to drop any story,” he said.
Despite the fact that a state agency, CHRAJ, cleared Mahama of any misconduct in the matter, Mahama lost the 2016 elections to Akufo-Addo.
In a late-2020 interview, he insisted that the claim was false.
