Your authoritative Newspaper welcomes you into the brand new year, 2012. We wish compatriots a renewed strength and energy, of endurance and of zeal; to be able to toggle between the year and its action-packed activities. But in everything that we do during the busy year; whether big or small, it’ll be patriotic to put Ghana first.
In the past years, what the Informer had observed, was that the government legal advisers, the ministry of Justice and Attorney-General’s Department needs to be pragmatic in its observation and handling of serious government legal issues, which often were adjudicated in the courts of public opinion, and with individual citizen’s expression in the airwaves than real professional opinion of law.
However; it is the in-house opinion of the Informer newspaper that The Attorney-General sits up and becomes more pragmatic in order not to paint a picture of a government trying to perpetuate legacy of class society; where baboons live above the law, and monkeys live under it.
Today, we are caught under situation as a nation, where ordinary people who, by dictates of hunger steal a bunch of plantain go to jail for 36 months, and big people who, by suggestions of their greed, gluttony and sheer avarice, loot people’s money are spared agonies of prosecution and jail. These are all dangerous precedents which have, in some countries led to the collapse human fabric and security.
A test case in point could be the recent case of revelations by government that over GH¢600,000,000.00 has been paid in judgment debts to some individuals and institutions.
Causation of this huge financial loss to the state of Ghana, did come through by actions and inactions of those the nation entrusted with power to prudently manage its meager resources for the maximum benefit for its citizenry.
The revelation which came at the heels of the latest payment of some GH¢42,000,000,00 to a single individual:- Consul Alfred Agbesi Woyome, has, and continues to rend hearts, because, people believe the said amount being paid by government did not come to it as manna from heaven. Even if it had been a foreign loan, posterity would one period of time toil to pay it back.
It is rather unfortunate that current generation of Ghanaians is subjected to nerve-wrecking taxation and other revenue charges to be able meet these kinds of senseless debts; as day-in and day-out it seems Ghanaian tax-payer’s problems refuse to subside. Indeed, it’s their ox that is always gored.
However; this paper believes the sages wisdom that what is good for the goose, must equally be good for the gander; not for the sake of ‘an eye for an eye’, but for the equity in the dispensation of justice.
For instance; if Tsatsu Tsikata of the GNPC fame, Daniel Korshie Abodakpui, Kwame Peprah, Ibrahim Adams, Adja-Sipa Yankey and others could be pushed to jail for ‘causing financial loss to the state’, in their respective roles played whiles in public office; and comrade Victor Selormey could be intimidatingly heckled to untimely death; how saintly are those committing worse and intentional crimes today?
It seems the Attorney-General as well as movers and shakers, in there, at the Ministry of Justice need to sit up if the current crop of leaders should avoid dangerous ramification of its inaction.
