The Politico-Legal Tussle: Is Justice Under Siege?
Jim Selassie takes a look.
The former Deputy Superintendent of Police (DSP)-turned Chief Justice (CJ) of Republic of Ghana, arguably by default of her New Patriotic Party (NPP) credentials, Her Ladyship Georgina Theodora Wood, is caught between a judicial-rock and hard place.
Auntie Gina (not Blay) must be a worried ‘chen-chen’ lady, sitting in the mess of dilemma, within the white-washed Ghana’s justice’s edifice – an embodiment of Freedom and Justice, facing the Accra High Street’s Kwame Nkrumah Mausoleum: in fact, Gina Wood is caught between faith and politics.
It is far-fetched that Samuel Ata Akyea Esq. of Zoe, Akyea & Co., an in-law of Chief Justice Gina Wood and replacement of Nana Addo-Dankwa Akufo-Addo, as Member of Parliament (MP) for the Abuakwa-South Constituency, whose lead-role at high profile court cases had won almost all the days for the NPP, could be opaque-d from the landmark electoral legal tussle, simmering at the Supreme Court. To many, this is strange.
Although, many a political pundit who ‘examine’ the mindset, instinct and behavoural symptoms of Brother Dankwa, find him suffering from the real disease of the ampain-dankwa, the bat, who would hang upside-down in his own known-world of the wilderness; fantasises himself of urinating on God from that disadvantaged position, but only ends soiling his own body; see?
All in all; the humble-pie is too small for an animal like the elephant to eat: That is what makes Ghana’s case dangerous, especially so, as Nana Addo-Dankwa Akufo-Addo and cohorts of Jacob Obetsebi-Lamptey, Kennedy Ohene-Agyapong and few others, have nursed and nurtured scores, if not hundreds, of their young ones in the schools of political belligerency, supplemented with the wine of the red-eyedness, spurred on with pep talks of anarchy and political chicanery. One may not right away spell out what discourse went on through the channels of the dark alleys between the Supreme Court and Nana Addo’s camp, after the cameral meeting that saw them leaving the court in protest of empanelment, but making a quick turn at a chagrin.
The case of NDC’s preferred joinder to the main suit of its candidate, eventually went to the NDC. But the NPP swears by low valleys and high heavens that the substantive case of annulling and voiding the December 7/8 Ghana’s elections would go its way “at all cost”.
Indeed; that would be President John Dramani Mahama’s ‘Second Coup d’état’: Comrade Mahama wrote himself, about his ‘First Coup d’état’ in an elaborate manner and prose. I wish him well; boy!
Okechuku Oje Johnson a.k.a. Adebola O.O.J., says his Yoruba adage believes that ‘a person the gods want to destroy, they first make mad’.
Chronology of Ghana’s politicking leading to the last December 7 and 8 elections, as far as the New Patriotic Party’s (NPP’s) last flagbearer, Nana Addo-Dankwa Akufo-Addo was concerned, never painted any different picture of man in the hands of angry gods. Almighty God loves the mighty republic founded on patriotism and nationalism by illustrious sons and daughters-of-volour and unyielding bravado. These enviable values traversed Osagyefo Dr. Kwame Nkrumah, through Jerry John Rawlings, and late, the late Professor John Evans Atta-Mills – these lacked, or, and wanted nothing worldly, but laid down the precious lives for the benefit of nation and ‘ordinary’ country-men and women.
The blessing most Ghanaians failed and dangerously so, to realize, is that God always shield His own country from political monsters of tribulations and chaos that had devoured order nations in African, through sheer ignorance, political mischief-making, blended and laced with anachronistic tendency of absent-mindedness of discerning real from wrong. This is bad for the nation decorated and endowed with rare African sages.
God even accepts, forbiddingly, that the NPP’s Nana Addo-Dankwa Akufo-Addo, in contemporary political history of the nation, is the most dangerous leader – accepted or rejected at any forum of political correctness, and often parried him from luck of ultimate leadership position of decision-making.
It is worth noting that Ghana, indeed, is at crossroads of sustainable democracy or it truncation, and has the choice to either shoot-up or shut-up. Yes! This would spare the nation the burden of carrying the heart in the hands at the eve of every fourth-electoral-year, begging God for peace – absence of election-related war that had befallen many nations, with Ghana at forefront of peacekeeping.
The nation’s pulse now rests in the wisdom and mercy of the Supreme Court of Ghana, the highest court of the land, with onerous duty of privilege to interpret murky constitutional issue – to either make or mar a nation on knees. The December 7/8, 2012 elections arguably passed as the most peaceful, free, fair and transparent, since Ghana’s independence from the British colonial vultures on March 6, 1957: And no level-headed political pundit would have thought that a clear loser, with margin unprecedented, since the advent of the fourth republic, would go to court with craves of usurping the people’s power on silver-platter, and at all cost.
Are the laws that guarantee freedom, peace and justice to all manner people under democracy working in Ghana?
To Be Continued.