Kwesi Pratt Ought to Know Better

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

His being a shameless mercenary in the pay of the key operatives of the so-called National Democratic Congress (NDC), and before the latter the Provisional National Defense Council (PNDC), ought not to blind Mr. Kwesi Pratt, Jr., to the fact that Mr. Tsatsu "The Thief" Tsikata is no ordinary decent Ghanaian lawyer. The man is a veritable murderer, to be certain a formally unconvicted one, and a criminal mastermind behind the so-called Public Tribunals and People's Courts, who ought to have been executed by firing squad, along with the legions of innocent and unsuspecting Ghanaians who prematurely went to their graves by the sinister instrumentality of this Legon- and Oxbridge-schooled monster (See "Pratt Lashes Out at GBA, Elements Who Hate Tsikata" MyJoyOnline.com 9/7/13).

Instead, Mr. Tsikata has been erroneously numbed into amnesiac innocence as to make him falsely believe that he is as behaviorally impeccable as a newly-born baby. It is in this context of his track-record of abject criminality that makes the Ghana Bar Association's caustic reprimand of Mr. Tsikata, for presuming to second-guess the moral and professional integrity of Justice Anin-Yeboah, all the more appropriate.

What also makes Mr. Tsikata's excoriation of Justice Anin-Yeboah highly suspicious is the fact that it eerily recalls the "revolutionary" tarring of the judiciary, as being pathologically corrupt and the judicial system inordinately riddled with tendentious technicalities, by the Rawlings junta prior to the abduction and summary execution - Mafia-style - of the three Akan-descended Accra High Court judges on June 30, 1982.

In essence, his unmistakable intention of impugning the credibility of Justice Anin-Yeboah was clearly to endanger the life of the latter; and failing in his sinister scheme, at least to effectively intimidate and professionally emasculate the respectable jurist. That Mr. Pratt curiously finds nothing wrong with the consistently atrocious and viciously partisan rulings of Justices Atuguba, Akoto-Bamfo and Gbadegbe is all the more to be pitied. It also makes Mr. Pratt's vehement defense of the lead counsel of the third respondent in the 2012 presidential election petition all the more hollow and mischievous.

That Mr. Tsikata participated in the Election 2012 petition hearings not as a neutral player, or even a spectator, but a passionately partisan advocate, ought to have cautiously guided Mr. Pratt as to the fact that Mr. Tsikata could not be credibly and wisely called upon to both play and referee his own game at the same time. And were he the journalist of substance that he claims to be, Mr. Pratt would also have invited a lead counsel from the camp of the petitioners or their representative to spar on the same program, at the same time, with the notorious Nsawam Prison convict.

Needless to say, it is rather silly and quixotically over-stretching of matters for the editor-publisher of the so-called Insight newspaper to assert that "some lawyers have done and said worse things than Mr. Tsikata, but are yet to be condemned by the Bar Association." Precisely who are these co-conspirators and fellow murderers of Mr. Tsikata's that Mr. Pratt is so self-righteously alluding to?

_________________________________________________________

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

Department of English

Nassau Community College of SUNY

Garden City, New York

Sept. 7, 2013

E-mail: okoampaahoofe@optimum.net

###