The Road to Kigali – Part 10

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

The lengths to which the Trokosi Group of Newspapers are willing to go in order to falsify the facts of historical reality in a bid to legitimizing the illegitimate declaration of President John Dramani Mahama as winner of Election 2012 is rather pathetic. Thus in the wake of the decision of Chief Justice Georgina T. Wood to establish two complaints secretariats vis-à-vis the prompt redressing of Election 2012-related grievances, the Herald Newspaper, one of the flagship Trokosi media establishments, had the following to report:

“The claim by the New Patriotic Party (NPP) that there was ‘Systematic Stealing’ at [sic] Friday’s presidential and parliamentary elections, must have forced Chief Justice Georgina T. Wood to establish two public complaints secretariats in anticipation of post-2012 election petitions(See “Chief Justice to Hear NPP & Akufo-Addo” Ghanaweb.com 12/11/12).

In reality, the establishment of the aforesaid secretariats has been in existence since 2008 (See “C J Sets Up Public Complaints Secretariats…For Post-2012 Election Petitions” Modernghana.com 12/10/12). Needless to say, the establishment of the Election Complaints Secretariats appears direly worrisome to operatives and supporters of the National Democratic Congress (NDC) because the latter are not known to respect and abide by decisions and verdicts handed down by the Supreme Court of Ghana. A striking case in point is the Obetsebi-Lamptey Decision, in which the court vindicated the National Chairman of the New Patriotic Party (NPP) in a government real estate property purchase, only to have sub-ministerial rogues likes Messrs. Okudzeto-Ablakwa and Omane Boamah, staunchly backed by the then terminally ill President John Evans Atta-Mills, refuse to comply with the court’s order.

Instead, the National Democratic Congress prefers to brazenly wave its criminal record of judicial ethnic cleansing in a deliberately calculated bid to morbidly intimidating Ghanaian citizens into docilely accepting the untenable. Yes, I have expressed my own misgivings about the integrity of Chief Justice Wood, even as I have also fiercely defended her integrity in the past when I felt that the hardnosed and cynical operatives of the NDC, such as Messrs. Atta-Mills and Kwabena Adjei, wanted her ousted from her post on grounds other than purely professional and/or managerial. My latest expression of such misgiving regarded effusive encomiums that the Chief Justice proffered President John Evans Atta-Mills in the wake of the latter’s demise, to the effect that a new court building be named for the late premier merely because the former Legon tax-law professor had promptly fulfilled his presidential obligation of duly causing funds to be released for the construction of the aforesaid courthouse.

Clearly, I based my admittedly harsh criticism of Mrs. Wood on the very legitimate grounds that while he had been fairly well known as a remarkable associate professor of law, nonetheless, the decedent premier never sat on any judicial bench or served as a jurist. Neither was he widely known or acknowledged as a radical catalyst for the salutary advancement of the way that the law is practiced in the country. Instead, one would have thought that Justice Wood would vigorously advocate for either the Supreme Court Building or the one for whose construction the late President Mills is alleged to have released funding to, to be named after a judicial legend like Justice Annie Jiagge, the first Ghanaian woman to be seated on the highest court of our land.

Yes, I have had my own misgivings about Chief Justice Wood’s deliberating on the NPP’s plaint vis-à-vis the massive rigging of Election 2012 by Dr. Kwadwo Afari-Gyan in favor of President John Dramani Mahama; but such misgiving is purely one of clinical objectivity rather than being ideological, the inescapable basis upon which NDC suspicion of this otherwise highly principled and competent judicial light is squarely predicated. I have even called for the constituting of a high-powered commission of the foremost jurists on the continent, preferably from outside the West African sub-region, to hear the Akufo-Addo/Mahama cause celebre.

In essence, what I am trying to argue here is that the key operatives of the so-called National Democratic Congress, including President Mahama, are afraid of their own proverbial shadow and may only be forced to comply with justice by the kind of blue-ribbon panel that I have in mind, rather than the Supreme Court of Ghana, which, by the way, is competently headed by a personality whom the NDC Abongo Boys love to malign and mordantly hate.

One thing, however, ought to be made crystal clear to the incurably cynical operatives of the National Democratic Congress: any politically ill-advised attempt to circumvent or countermand any Supreme Court ruling on the Akufo-Addo/Mahama case, should such ruling be deemed not to favor the NDC, will be fiercely resisted. Indeed, it could well inch us dangerously close to Kigali. A word to the wise…. Then, again, what am I thinking and talking about here? A word to the who?

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

Department of English

Nassau Community College of SUNY

Garden City, New York

Dec. 20, 2012