Open letter to Human Rights Lawyer Martin Kpebu

Dear Respectable Martin Kpebu

I have for sometime now admired your exploits at using the Supreme Court to expand the frontiers of our liberties. More grease to your elbows.

Today, I watched you on JoyNews TV's NewsFile program, as you described GETFund's decision to award foreign scholarships to some Ghanaian politicians and students, as "Legal, But a Little Bit Reckless."

So, I have been reading the law to find your reason for that statement, and I am still wondering how the OBJECT of GETFund (as boldly stated in Act 581 section 2), can suddenly be overridden by the procedural arrangement of approvals you used to justify your position.

In my reading of the GETFund Act, I find your position untenable. The fact that GETfund got approval (for their budget) from Parliament, does not make the decision to award foreign scholarships legal and justifiable. The decision to go against the OBJECT of the fund makes it illegal and totally reckless an expenditure.

I still cant find the section or subsection in the GETFund law (Act 581) that mandated the fund managers to retail scholarships on their own, or directly award foreign scholarships.

Dear Martin Kpebu, please note that:

(1) What happened at GETFUND is more than "A Little Bit Reckless".

It is unfortunate that somebody like you will seek to mitigate such a monumental national disaster. You chose to temper such a betrayal of public trust with no harsh condemnation and no strong demand for reforms. Its a shame.

(2) What happened at GETFund is a flagrant and cruel abuse of the OBJECTIVES of GETFund as stated under Section 2 of Act 581. And you and your likes cannot superimpose any other procedural law above the OBJECT of GETFund stated in the law.

Dear Mr Human Rights Lawyer,

I am sure I don't need to remind you that the "m?b?riwa" demonstration organised by NUGS, leading to the establishment of GETFund, was not a demonstration that called for foreign scholarships to be awarded Ghanaian students.

The petition of NUGS that called for the creation of GETFund was not for politicians and their cronies to get GETFund scholarships for themselves and their children to go overseas for education.

It is for the actualisation of the expectations of NUGS, that Act 581 introduced the OBJECT of the fund and indeed instructed that the fund invests in Ghana.

Dear Martin Kpebu, please, do not repeat this attempt to suppress condemnation of recklessness in public office. Such unfortunate expenditures lead to the continuous existence of ramshackle classrooms that sometimes lead to deaths of school kids.

Honestly, I thought as a Human Rights lawyer, the memory of those 6 school pupils who recently died in Breman in the Central Region because they were learning in a dilapidated classroom which collapsed on them, would have dominated your mind. I thought the spirits of the little ones would have driven your passion to link their needless deaths as mass murders, which the GETFund must bear greater amount of responsibility.

I thought you will be concerned about the regular TV reports from communities with poor educational facilities and which is denying some Ghanaian kids the opportunity to get some education.

Finally, it is uncommon to see worried students crying over their inability to pay their fees on our University campuses, during deadlines for registration. You are regular visitor to the University of Ghana and therefore you should have known a better use of GETFund

moneys, than awarding foreign scholarships.

Dear Human Rights Lawyer, schools kids are dying in dilapidated school structures, Ghanaian school kids are sitting on stones and learning under makeshift structures, some university students are crying for small help to pay their fees.

Please, this is not a LITTLE BIT.

This is serious issue that should occupy your mind.

Thank you.

Benjamin Essuman

Gyedu Ahenfie

Mankesim C/R