By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.
When I first came across the news item captioned “Tsikata Blesses Henrietta Abban: May She Rise to the Top” (MyJoyOnline.com 6/20/09), I couldn’t stop myself from sneering. For, indeed, one had to be extremely daft to believe that the notorious convicted scam-artist, demonic mind behind the PNDC death squad (otherwise known as the People’s Court and Public Tribunal) and former CEO of the Ghana National Petroleum Corporation (GNPC) was capable of entertaining any progressive or blissful thoughts about his sworn and mortal enemies. Unless, of course, Mr. Tsikata just awoke from a wet-dream in which Ms. Abban was ravenously fellating him. Fat chance!
Well, I really don’t know what Mr. Fiifi Koomson thought he had heard the former University of Ghana law school lecturer say about Ms. Abban but, in fact, what the convicted and presumptuous fraudster implied during the bizarre first-anniversary celebration of the so-called Free Tsatsu Movement was that so abject had the caliber of the men and women required to serve on the Supreme Court become that it wouldn’t be totally objectionable, at all, to have the valiant Ghanaian judicial wit who put him in his place named as the next Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of Ghana.
This is precisely why somebody with guts ought to have schooled Comrade Tsikata about the stark fact that high judicial quality on the bench is not induced, or systematically cultivated, by summarily causing the brutal assassination of Supreme Court judges either because the victims not only happen to belong to the wrong ethnic sub-nationality, but also because they subscribe to an ideological perspective and/or culture to which one is immitigably averse.
To appreciate the full thrust of Tsatsu’s sarcasm, we have decided to quote, verbatim, the relevant portion of his gibe, and jab, at Justice Abban as follows: “I hope someday she also reaches the pinnacle of her professional career at the Supreme Court. Because unfortunately, there are other people at [on?] the Supreme Court already who actually are much younger than her and who are not necessarily any more competent than her [she is?] who probably got there for other political reasons and not legitimate reasons [ones?].”
In other words, the overriding motive in celebrating the first anniversary of the so-called Free Tsatsu Movement was to hold both Justice Abban and the entire membership of the Ghanaian Supreme Court up for unqualified ridicule.
What is interesting here is that this kind of insufferable arrogance, mischievously disguised as a refined sense of charity and moral superiority, which is all-too-characteristic of the key operatives of the so-called National Democratic Congress (NDC), is almost invariably lauded when it comes from the motor-mouth of Comrade Tsatsu. Interestingly, though, when it is exhibited by any member of the New Patriotic Party (NPP) ever so slightly, as it were, then, of course, such behavior is deemed to constitute the very height of arrogance. And when it emanates from Messrs. Rawlings and Atta-Mills then, perforce, it becomes an enviable mark of humility.
Still, I doubt very much that the infamous Nsawam jail-bird had his presence of mind, or control over his cranial faculties, when he uttered the remarks attributed to him above. Otherwise, he would have also promptly observed that any qualitative lack on the Supreme Bench of Ghana is, indubitably, the direct result of the Rawlings-Tsikata “revolution,” during which extortionate epoch the august Court was swiftly and systematically purged of its best and brightest, in order to make way for…you know who.
The quote above also gives you a vivid, if also eerily petrifying, insight into the reason why Mr. Tsikata continues to quixotically impugn the credibility of those smart and bold enough to call him out on his at once sociopathic and misanthropic behavioral traits.
You see, what actually got lost in translation by Joy News reporter Fiifi Koomson is the quite limpid rhetorical subtext of “the moral grandstand.” In other words, from his speech, Tsatsu Tsikata appears to be foolhardily insistent on the righteousness of his devious attempt to bilk the government and the Ghanaian taxpayer hundreds of thousands of dollars in theft for which he was handed a 5-year judicial slap on the wrist at Nsawam. And it is for the preceding observations that I take this rare opportunity to counsel the curricular administrators in all of our schools and institutes of journalism and mass communication to immediately introduce courses in “Critical Thinking,” so as to ensure that otherwise diligent reporters like Fiifi Koomson are not pathetically discombobulated, or taken in, by unconscionable mischief-makers like Mr. Tsakata.
*Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D., is Associate Professor of English, Journalism and Creative Writing at Nassau Community College of the State University of New York, Garden City. He is the author of “Ghanaian Politics Today” (Atumpan Publications/Lulu.com, 2008). E-mail: okoampaahoofe@aol.com.
