You’re at the right place at the right time – Tsatsu recalls 1st Sunday at Nsawam Prison

Lawyer Tsatsu Tsikata has noted that a very interesting aspect of his life at the Nsawam Prison was the first Sunday that he had to attend the United Church meant for the protestant congregation within the Nsawam Prison.

According to him, when he first walked into the Chapel, one Pastor Jones Owusu Adjei, who had come from Asamankese to minister to them, started acknowledging him because he had heard a lot about a lawyer called Tsatsu Tsikata.

“Before he preaches, a young lady comes to minister a song and she gets up and she says: ‘You’re in the right place at the right time’ and I thought that meant something for me,” Tsatsu Tsikata told KSM on Pan African TV on the KSM show broadcast Tuesday.

He indicated that, on that fateful day, Pastor Jones Owusu Adjei preached the story of Joseph in the Bible which spoke to him directly.

In the preaching, the pastor quoted the scriptures where Joseph told his brothers who sold him into slavery that “you meant it for evil but God meant it for good”.

“And that was the message for me because whatever evil was meant about me being there, God meant it for good and in fact, that was the title of a reflection I wrote a year later,” Tsikata recalled.

He added that through those five months he spent in prison interacting with the prisoners, “it was a rich experience, a rich human experience”, like going to law school all over again because he heard directly from prisoners, instead of the hitherto habeas corpus cases he was handling that brought people out of prison without having heard from the prisoners directly.

Background

The Accra Fast Track High Court sentenced former Ghana National Petroleum Corporation Chief Executive, Tsatsu Tsikata, to five years imprisonment on charges of wilfully causing financial loss to the State.

Justice Henrietta Abban handed down the controversial sentence to Tsatsu Tsikata in 2018 when the trial process was incomplete, with appeals pending on whether to call the International Finance Corporation to testify or not.

Tsatsu Tsikata was charged with three counts of wilfully causing financial loss of GH¢230,000 (2.3 billion old Ghana cedis) to the State through a loan he, on behalf of GNPC, guaranteed for Valley Farms, a private company, and another count of misapplying public property.

He was found guilty on all four counts and sentenced to five years on each, with the sentences running concurrently.

Tsatsu, a lawyer, had attended court without his usual counsel in the case, Professor Emmanuel Victor Oware Dankwa, who he said had travelled. He was therefore seeking an adjournment from the court.

Justice Abban, however, asked him to represent himself since he was a lawyer.

After the judgement, Tsatsu Tsikata served notice he was applying for bail and appealing against his conviction and sentencing, and spent some amount of time filing his appeal processes at the court registry, before being whisked away to Nsawam Prison.