Intellectual Lassitude of Ghana Supreme Court

- The Bazooka Response

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

According to the General-Secretary of the main opposition New Patriotic Party (NPP), Mr. Kwadwo Owusu-Afriyie, also widely known as "Sir John," more than 96 hours, or four days, after the delivery of its verdict on the 2012 presidential election petition, print-copies of the verdict are still unavailable at the Registry of the Supreme Court (See "Sir John: Why Can't We Get Copies of Election Judgment?" Radioxyzonline.com / Ghanaweb.com 9/1/13).

It may be recalled that shortly before the conclusion of the Election 2012 Presidential Petition Hearings, the NPP scribe and a member of the party's communication team, Mr. Hopeson Adorye, were brought up on charges of criminal contempt of court and, respectively, fined GHC 5,000 and GHC 2,000. Sir John's charge was that he had subjected the president of the nine-member Supreme Court panel that heard the case, Mr. William Atuguba, to public ridicule. Mr. Owusu-Afriyie had, reportedly, opined on air that Justice Atuguba was a "clown," among other vitriolic invectives; in effect, Sir John had called Mr. Atuguba a grossly incompetent president of the court. He would diplomatically and advisedly cop a guilty plea and be spared a 6-month prison sentence.

In the wake of Thurday, August 29, 2013's handing down of its decision by the Ghana Supreme Court, Mr. Owusu-Afriyie clearly appears to have been vindicated. Sir John has been vindicated because what the Atuguba-presided Supreme Court did was essentially to blatantly ignore the forensically proven evidence - major among them, the flagrant occurrence of over-voting and voting without biometric verification - and simply deliver its verdict almost strictly and cynically along partisan political lines.

What makes the entire episode irredeemably scandalous is the fact that it took the court a protracted 8 months to arrive at its patently pedestrian decision. As my good friend Sydney Casely-Hayford, writing from the nation's capital poignantly commented, "The one great lesson that Ghanaians have [rather traumatically] learned from the ruling of the Atuguba-presided Supreme Court is that the next time there erupts another similar electoral dispute, the would [absolutely] be no need to take it to court." In my good friend's opinion, the antidote to any likely recurrence of the Election 2012 Presidential Petition is to radically improve the way that governance is done in the country. Exactly how this can be done without the legal and constitutional backing of the Supreme Court, my good friend would not say. Now, of course, that is a gentleman and a scholar's approach to a seemingly intractable problem.

My more pragmatic tack may be aptly called the "Bazooka Approach." And it simply entails the most democratic and justice-minded among us arming themselves to the hilt for the Armageddon, and entering the polling booth and making sure that no whiny complaints are left behind for our forensically proven edentate Supreme Court to play thuggish and nose-thumbing games with.

Of course, what this unmistakably means is that this writing must be deemed as an eviction notice to Chief Justice Georgina T. Wood and her associates, one that ought to promptly make them start packing out the old British colonial edifice whose constitutional, and institutional, significance was effectively lost in the latest ruling and start looking for new lines of work. The Ghana Supreme Court has a serious credibility problem that cannot be lightly wished away. That is a forensically provable and, indeed, proven fact!

That four protracted days after merely and largely voting on the patently trashy basis of tribalism and political partisanship, the Supreme Court still has no written record of its decision, ought to fearfully inform us of the literary skills and the caliber of people being pathetically showcased around the world as the finest judicial minds of Ghana. Prime Minister Busia was right: "No Court! No Court!"

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

Department of English

Nassau Community College of SUNY

Garden City, New York

Sept. 1, 2013

E-mail: okoampaahoofe@optimum.net

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