Absolutely no contempt of court here!

The order, reportedly, by an Accra High Court Judge for the long-indicted Mr. Gregory Afoko, the prime suspect in the brutal acid-dousing assassination of Mr. Adams Mahama, then Upper-East’s Regional Chairman of the now-ruling New Patriotic Party (NPP), to be granted a release from jail on bail could not be more preposterous (See “CID Boss, Tiwaa Addo-Danquah Cited for Contempt of Court” 3News.com / Ghanaweb.com 4/30/19).

For starters, Mr. Gregory Afoko, the younger brother of the dismissed National Chairman of the then main opposition New Patriotic Party ought to have been conclusively prosecuted and sentenced to a long prison term or, better yet, life imprisonment with hard labor by now.

We make this emphatic observation because there is foolproof evidence, in the form of firsthand information provided by the deceased victim to police investigators shortly before Mr. Adams Mahama succumbed to the most horrible of injuries and wounds ever to be sustained by any human in Ghana’s postcolonial history. So, really, it is Justice George Buadi who ought to be found to be in criminal contempt of the delivery of condign justice and not Maame Tiwaa Addo-Danquah, the Director-General of the Criminal Investigations Department of the Ghana Police Service, who well appears to be pulling all the levers to make justice prevail for the Mahama family.

At any rate, the Attorney-General, Ms. Gloria Akuffo, and the pertinent authorities of the Ghana Police Service (GPS) have a bounden obligation, as well as a higher duty and obligation to Divine Providence and humankind to flatly refuse to accede to the monetary sum of bail reportedly granted Mr. Gregory Afoko by Justice Buadi, if the former executive authorities are convinced that releasing the prime suspect in the brutal assassination of Mr. Adams Mahama into society poses a far greater threat and danger than having the younger Mr. Afoko safely locked behind bars. We must also further emphasize the fact that ample evidence already exists that one of the alleged criminal suspects escaped arrest in the wake of the acid-dousing fatal assault of Mr. Adams Mahama on the presumable tipoff of the prime murder suspect and has yet to be apprehended and brought to justice, more than three or four years later.

Plus, we all also know that Mr. Gregory Afoko’s elder brother, Mr. Paul Afoko, then the National Chairman of the New Patriotic Party, had dastardly and mischievously attempted to cook an alibi for the prime suspect that almost immediately fell apart, once police investigators began to meticulously piece the scattered pieces of evidence together. What the foregoing means is that granting a bail release to such a high-risk criminal suspect would be simply suicidal, especially coming at a time when the professional competence, efficiency, capacity and capability of the institutional machinery of the entire Ghana Police Service are at an all-time low or could not be functionally more dismal and abysmal.

Indeed, it would be better and far more profitable for the Attorney-General and the GPS’ authorities to petition Chief Justice Sophia Akuffo and the Ghana Judicial Council to have the professional performance of Justice Buadi promptly reviewed vis-à-vis the latter’s handling of the Adams Mahama Assassination Case, with the overriding objective of having a different and more progressive and competent judge take over this case, which has decidedly turned into an insufferable burlesque of musical chairs. And then have Justice Buadi promptly reassigned to a more suitable post. Indeed, it is inescapably embarrassing for us to have to admit that the colonial judicial system that was minted and presided over by the British imperialists did a far better job of delivering justice than the current wishy-washy and/or scatterbrained system, which is unarguably far worse than a Hobbesian State-of-Nature judicial culture in which the Darwinian principle of Survival-of-the-Fittest prevails.

Also, it is revoltingly insulting to the intelligence of Ghanaian citizenry for anybody on the Afoko Legal Team to facilely presume to petition Amnesty International to intervene in the sovereign culture of Ghanaian jurisprudence, in pretty much the same lurid manner that the morally blighted members of the Woyome Legal Team have scandalously and quixotically resorted to using the Arusha-based African Human Rights Court in order to have their client avoid squarely facing his unavoidable duty of returning the GH? 51.2 Million that Mr. Woyome squirreled out of our National Treasury, with the criminal complicity and brazen abetment of the key operatives of the National Democratic Congress (NDC), including then-President John Evans Atta-Mills, the extant Finance Minister and the Attorney-General and the associates of the extant holders of the latter two ministerial portfolios.

Indeed, if there is any “Travesty of Justice” in the Adams Mahama Assassination Case, such travesty actually stems from the untenable and irresponsible stance reportedly taken by Justice Buadi on this matter, almost as if the brutal liquidation of the then-Upper-East’s Regional Chairman of the then-opposition New Patriotic Party, in the leadup to the 2016 general election, amounted to a benign and an ordinary civil suit entailing a mere verbal assault or even a punch-pulling fisticuffs in the marketplace. It goes without saying that absolutely no serious democracy in the world would appoint a judge to sit on one of its superior benches who has the temperament and the unconscionably blighted intellectual capacity of a Mafia capo. God save us from ourselves!

*Visit my blog at: kwameokoampaahoofe.wordpress.com Ghanaffairs

By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., PhD

English Department, SUNY-Nassau

Garden City, New York