John Bless Oti
Just as most of us were beginning to put the Montie Three’s act of judicial criminality behind us, it has emerged that the man who was recently confirmed as the Deputy Minister for Local Government, Mr. Bless Oti, who also doubles as the National Democratic Congress’ Member of Parliament for Nkwanta-North, in the Volta Region, had actually said worse things on the same radio program that saw Messrs, Alistair Nelson, Godwin Gunn and Salifu Maase sentenced to 4 months’ imprisonment by the Supreme Court
(See “Attack on CJ Worse than Rwandan Genocide Propaganda – Franklin Cudjoe” Citifmonline.com / Ghanaweb.com 7/30/16).
I, however, beg to differ with Mr. Franklin Cudjoe, the Execuitive Director of the Accra-based IMANI-Ghana think-tank, that the invectives deployed by the Nkwanta-North NDC-MP against Chief Justice Georgina Theodora Wood were worse than those used by Rwanda’s Hutu radio and television broadcasters against that country’s powerful Tutsi ethnic minority and their Hutu sympathizers.
Needless to say, the 1994-5 Rwanda genocide has no comparison, whatsoever, in the recent memory of wars on the African continent. Twenty years on, the Rwanda genocide remains at once the most barbaric and tragic of its kind in Africa. It is also the most humiliating and embarrassing to the dignity of the proverbial African personality.
What needs pointing out, now that the name of Chief Justice Wood has appeared in this national discourse on the institution of the Ghanaian judiciary and its membership, particularly those on the level of the Supreme Court, is the fact that since the June 30, 1982 brutal assassination of the three Akan-descended Accra High Court judges.
The Supreme Court had then been abolished by the Acheampong-led junta of the Supreme Military Council (SMC-I) – the key operatives of the erstwhile Provisional National Defense Council (PNDC) and the latter’s institutional successor, the so-called National Democratic Congress (NDC), both led by Chairman Jerry John Rawlings, have persistently and consistently made every effort to run down the image and reputation of the judicial system in general, but particularly the Supreme Court of Ghana.
The objective here well appears to be that of enabling the Rawlings Posse to become a veritable law onto itself. Which is why the recent sentencing of the pro-NDC Montie Three scofflaws to 4 months’ imprisonment, apiece, continues to outrage the key operatives of the National Democratic Congress, including a remarkable percentage of the members of the Mahama cabinet.
If he genuinely subscribed to the sacred and civilized tenets of democratic principles and culture, President John Dramani Mahama would have promptly demanded the resignation of rabble-rousing agitators like Foreign Minister Hanna Tetteh and Culture and Tourism Minister Elizabeth Ofosu-Agyare.
Indeed, the very attempt to malign the hard-earned reputation of Chief Justice Wood did not begin today. To be certain, as early as the beginning of 2009, the Atta-Mills-led government of the National Democratic Congress would launch a blistering campaign against the Kufuor-appointed Mrs. Wood purely on ideological grounds.
The head of the Ghana judicial system would also be bluntly ignored in a parliamentary address on the state of the nation, in front of the panoply of the diplomatic corps. This writer vividly recalls writing and publishing several articles in which he earnestly pleaded with Mrs. Wood not to resign out of crass NDC intimidation, as the Republic of Ghana was not the property of any single political party or individual leader, for that matter.
It well appears that the relentless campaign to oust the Chief Justice had been aimed at enabling the NDC operatives ride roughshod over the democratic and human rights of the Ghanaian people.
There is a strange ironic twist about the fact that the overwhelming majority of the Mahama cabinet appointees who have ganged up against Chief Justice Wood, by appending their signatures to the circulating petition seeking to have President Mahama overturn the Supreme Court verdict against the Montie Three are women.
They are the same women who recently discovered their feminism in the wake of Mr. Kennedy Ohene Agyapong’s launching of a coital payola vitriol against Mrs. Charlotte Kesson-Smith Osei, the Mahama-appointed Chairperson of the so-called Independent Electoral Commission (EC).
My beef with the wishy-washy parliamentary minority leadership of the New Patriotic Party regards their decision to facilitate the ministerial confirmation of a clinically unenlightened barbarian like Mr. Oti to the significant portfolio of Deputy Local Government Minister. Messrs. Osei Kyei Mensah-Bonsu and Dominic Nitiwul ought to bow their heads in shame.
