Cousin Atta-Akyea, Too Many Justices To Take On, Already!

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

I fully back you on your remark that the justices on the Atuguba-presided panel, in the Kenneth Kuranchie contempt charge, may well have behaved like some schoolyard bullies, gratuitously craving rather than commanding the respect of their hapless victims. I personally remember a few bullies from St. Peter's Secondary School - PERSCO - that a couple of them strikingly resemble. And I am also quite certain that you remember a few from your secondary alma-mater; perhaps even from Akropong SALEM where you, my then junior, left me behind by one year, because of my GSTS "PASS-NO-WAY" common-entrance results.

My elder brother, a star-student at GSTS, just as our father had been some twenty years before, would not hear of my admission by Wesley Grammar. Anyway, all this tirade against the bullhorn-toting members of the Atuguba panel is decidedly beside the point (See "Atta-Akyea: Supreme Court Justices Undermined The Principle of Justice" JoyOnline.com / Ghanaweb.com 7/6/13).

If you so strongly believe that, in fact, Ken Kuranchie was royally screwed, or railroaded, all you needed to do, as I amicably advised a couple of weeks ago, was for you to have promptly filed a "Show Cause" grievance against the same and forgotten about the fact that by the time that the case came up before the court, Mr. Kuranchie would have already served out his 10-day prison sentence. This is what the "Principle" of justice, that you so pontifically claim was sorely lacking in your client's showdown with the Atuguba-presided Supreme Court, is incontrovertibly about.

My concern here, though, is that your mounting a media blitz-krieg against those "Your Lordships" would not help your cause or achieve very much. In fact, it could well backfire and come back to haunt you somewhere down the proverbial road. Unless, of course, you intend the Kuranchie faux-pas to mark the beginning of the end of your professional dealings with the Supreme Court. I also notice that the legally savvy in Ghana, these days, call the Supreme Court by its terse initials of "SC," and that is rather rhetorically mellifluous. Here in the United States, we call it "SCOTUS," that is, the Supreme Court of the United States."

Anyway, my point here is that it is better to stop unnecessarily roiling the waters, as it were, before you shortly live to regret the same. You know, you have two sticky problems here the best way around which is to simply lick your wounds and move on. And as I intimated in my last missive captioned "Shame On You, Cousin Atta-Akyea," if you play a good boy, you may even end up sitting next to Justice William Atuguba one of these days, who knows? You darn well know yourself that you are one of the finest legal lights in the country at the moment; and you don't want to do anything untoward to vitiate that hard-earned reputation.

Well, as I was saying earlier on, the first problem that you have here is that nobody really believes that even as brainy as you are, that you are in anyway smarter than all the nine justices on the Atuguba-presided panel combined. You know, there is unbested power in synergy? You also risk unnecessarily being envisaged as insolent; and that is not good for your legal practice.

Anyway, kindly extend my good wishes and warm regards to Cousin Nana Asante Bediatuo; I hope the bullet-chomping man is in good spirits.

By the way, your second problem here is that since God does not appear to be touching down anytime soon at Kotoka, at least not to the best of my knowledge - and I do have remarkable psychical powers in these matters - you had better swallow your pride and make peace with the bully-boys on the "SC." You see, you even have the rare privilege of also being a legitimately elected Member of Parliament. What this means is that if you are averse to what the SC bully-boys are doing, you can always table a constitutional amendment to have their oversized wings promptly trimmed down to size. Talk to you, again, soon, Coz.

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*Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.
Department of English
Nassau Community College of SUNY
Garden City, New York
July 6, 2013
E-mail: [email protected]
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