By All Means, Let The Court Decide!

By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.

I am not a lawyer and never really desired to be one, even though many friends, associates and acquaintances believe that had I decided on law as a career, I would have turned out to be a darn crackerjack one. Of course, I don't for one moment doubt that I could have turned a darn crackerjack attorney. But should have, would have, I never became a lawyer - not even a Cambridge township pocket wannabe lawyer; you know who I'm talking about, of course. And as my maternal grandfather would have said, it is all well and good.

Anyway, the preceding brings me to the Atuguba Court's ordering of the parties involved in the Election 2012 petition before the Supreme Court to sort out the issues which the parties prayerfully desire the Court to decide and rule on, once a formal hearing by the Supreme Court begins sometime very soon, we hope.

The media's shabby reportage of this preliminary aspect of the petition appears to be confusing a lot of people, including some who imperiously style themselves as "public intellectuals" and front-row "political analysts." My simple understanding of the issue, though, is that the Supreme Court is not a trial court; it primarily exists to definitively deliberate and rule on issues that often the lower courts, including the Court of Appeals, have been unable to rule upon to the satisfaction of one of the parties to any specific case brought before it.

For that matter, I have been wondering for sometime now why the first judicial port of call by Nana Akufo-Addo and the main opposition New Patriotic Party had not been, say, the Fast-Track High Court. But, of course, this is to rather presumptuously assume that the major players involved in the case on the New Patriotic Party side, somehow, do not know precisely why they decided to take their current judicial route.

What is quite interesting, though, is the gross misrepresentation by some woefully misguided National Democratic Congress partisans, parading as legal mavens, of the instruction of the petitioners and the defendants, or co-defendants, by the Atuguba Court "to decide on the memorandum of issues it [they] want[s] the court to determine" to mean the striking of some sort of a "compromise."

In other words, these paid NDC shills and propagandists would have their readers believe that the Atuguba Court is nothing short of another feckless "Peace Council" of the mongoloid breed witnessed at the Manhyia Palace of Otumfuo Osei-Tutu I in the lead-up to Election 2012. Nothing could be farther from the truth.

Indeed, by instructing the parties to sort out the memorandum of issues which they pray the Court to consider, once the formal hearing of the case begins at full-swing, what the justices hearing the case appear to be aiming for is the sound and complete avoidance of disruptions and unnecessary distractions. The Court also aims to ensure the best practice of procedural agency on the part of the key players involved in the petition. By so doing, the Court will thereby guarantee that the finality, and clinical impartiality, of its verdict would not be in doubt or held to scorn when subjected to the highest quality of analysis by leading legal analysts and judicial experts around the globe. Still, however, I find this situation/ instruction to be rather tricky.

I find it to be rather tricky because it preemptively indemnifies the Atuguba Court, at the same time that it positions the petitioners, especially the Akufo-Addo Group, in quite a difficult situation and one that verges dangerously on a voluntary temporization of the key issues on which its strongest forensic evidence may be predicated. One thing is also clear: it veritably was the adamant refusal of the Electoral Commissioner to play fair that engendered the grievances at issue. Likewise, President John Dramani Mahama and the National Democratic Congress, which the former represents, have been in shameless cahoots with Dr. Kwadwo Afari-Gyan, the chairman of the Electoral Commission, in the opprobrious and flagrant decision to pass off a patently rigged and fraudulent election results to the Ghanaian electorate, in gross violation of the country's 1992 Fourth-Republican Constitution.

And it is on this basis, primarily, that I strongly believe the onus of the determination of the issues to be decided by the Atuguba Court squarely rests with the Court itself, rather than instructing the "victims" of the 2012 election massacre to curiously collaborate with their "assailants" or "rapists" in a mock searc for justice!

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*Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.

Nassau Community College of SUNY

Garden City, New York

March 18, 2013

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