Mr. President, spare us the Kevin Taylor pretence
By P.K. Sarpong
Mr. President, did you say you don’t know Kevin Taylor? President John Dramani Mahama, today, you’re distancing yourself from someone you yourself have hired to do a mercenary job for you?
Sir, please, spare us this melodrama! Ghanaian politics may be many things, but it is not a theatre where everybody is expected to forget what they have seen and heard.
You may say you have never met Kevin Taylor or spoken to him. Fine. But to stand before Ghanaians and say that you simply do not know Kevin Taylor is to stretch disbelief beyond breaking point.
Must a man sit in your office, shake your hand and take a photograph with you before you can be said to know him? Let us examine the public record.
- When your government came into office, Anne Sansa Daly, who has been publicly associated with Kevin Taylor, was appointed to the NHIA Board. The appointment was subsequently revoked before she was sworn in when she was ‘busted’ for holding herself up as a medical doctor when she wasn’t.
- Kevin Taylor has repeatedly presented himself publicly as someone operating in your political interest. If he is simply an unknown stranger to you, why has he been so comfortable presenting himself as part of your political ecosystem?
- There have been public claims that he was brought to Ghana, given access to the VIP facilities at the airport and accommodated at the official residence of Vice President Jane Naana Opoku-Agyemang. If that is false, why didn’t you tell Ghanaians plainly that it is false? It is not false!
- There have been claims that he received legal assistance in connection with his Supreme Court contempt proceedings. This is not fiction, for it happened.
- There have also been claims of a celebration at the official residence of the Vice President following his Supreme Court victory. If that never happened, deny it with the same enthusiasm with which you denied knowing him.
- There have been questions about security protection provided to him while in Ghana. That is not mythology. Government records can establish whether such protection existed.
Here comes the most obvious question: Kevin Taylor has spent years attacking your political opponents with a ferocity that would make some professional party communicators look unemployed. His political commentary has consistently operated in a direction that benefits your side, yet, we are now being asked to believe that the man behind all this is simply some mysterious character called Kevin Taylor whom the President of Ghana does not know?
Come on, Mr. President. You don’t have to know a man personally to know him politically. When Martin Kpebu publicly stated that people within your political establishment sponsor Kevin Taylor, that assertion did not come from Mars. It was made publicly and is therefore capable of being tested against evidence.
So, Mr. President, stop playing with semantics.
If you mean “I have never met Kevin Taylor,” say that. If you mean “I have never spoken to Kevin Taylor,” say that. If you mean “I have never authorised any government official to assist Kevin Taylor,” say that. If you mean “I have absolutely no relationship, direct or indirect, with Kevin Taylor,” say that and allow the relevant facts to speak for themselves.
But “I don’t know Kevin Taylor”? Sir, that answer is so thin that even the most charitable Ghanaian would struggle to swallow it.
Mr. President, nobody is asking you to confess to knowing Kevin Taylor if you don’t. We are asking you to stop insulting the intelligence of Ghanaians with an answer that raises more questions than it settles, because at this point, the question is no longer merely whether you know Kevin Taylor.
The question is why you seem so determined to convince Ghanaians that you don’t. Sir, you’re a Christian, or so they say, but with this, your public denial of your own attack dog, the very person you’ve been paying to attack your political opponents- one wonders what type of Christian you are.
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