Deliberate Misreading of State Department Report on Ghana

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

I just finished reading Peter Kojo Apisawu’s interpretive report on the International Narcotics Control Strategy Report (INCSR) allegedly submitted by the U. S. Department of State to the United States’ House of Representatives, or the U. S. Congress, and can arrive at only one definitive conclusion – and it is that the reporter is a far better pro-National Democratic Congress (NDC) propagandist than both Mr. Richard Quashigah, the official NDC propaganda secretary, and Deputy Information Minister Samuel Okudzeto Ablakwa (See “Ghana’s Judiciary Is Corrupt – U. S. State Department” Ghanaweb.com 8/24/10).
What the reporter, perhaps, conveniently fails to highlight is the fact that even here in the United States of America, our last two presidents, Messrs. George W. Bush and Barack H. Obama, have on occasion bitterly complained about “activist judges,” both liberal and conservative, who seemed to prioritize personal ideological penchants over what these two First Gentlemen of the Union deeply perceived to be the most objective way of interpreting the law and drawing expert decisions therefrom.
What is significant to bear in mind here, though, is that while, indeed, President Obama is a notable constitutional lawyer, nevertheless, the first African-American prime resident of the White House has never served as a judge. Even so, during his most recent State of the Union Address, for example, Mr. Obama took an unusual swipe at the John Roberts-led United States Supreme Court, particularly regarding how some civil rights and political campaign-reform laws were being mischievously and callously whittled away by the use of deliberately ambiguous judicial language and decisions.
For his part, we must also pertinently observe here that former President George W. Bush has no legal background, whatsoever, having specialized in Business Administration at Yale and Harvard universities, at both of which Ivy League institutions he is not particularly remembered as a distinguished student. Still, one relevant conclusion can be aptly drawn about Messrs. Bush and Obama: And it is the palpable fact that both of these presidents firmly believe the United States’ judicial system to be riddled with an uncomfortable percentage of judges whose interpretation of the law and decisions leave much to be desired, which is simply a more diplomatic way of asserting that the American judicial system may very well be as corrupt as its far more feeble and younger counterpart.
Consequently, merely stating that the Ghanaian judicial system is corrupt does not amount to really saying much. To be certain, all that the latter means is that like the Presidency itself, the Ghanaian judicial system is an incurably fallible human institution.
Having thus duly registered the preceding observations, it bears pointing out to readers, of course, that Mr. Apisawu’s article did not conclusively prove that, indeed, the United States’ Department of State (or the U. S. Foreign Affairs Ministry) has categorically singled out Ghana’s judicial system as being uniquely corrupt. Instead, the writer elliptically quotes the following second-hand observations in support of his overriding theme of judicial corruption: “…corruption is pervasive in Ghana’s law enforcement community, including sections of the police and the NACOB [i.e. Narcotics Control Board]. Despite the regular arrests of suspected narcotics traffickers, Ghana has a low rate of conviction, which many officials believe is likely due to corruption within the judiciary.”
What the preceding quote does not adumbrate is the real, or true, story behind the perennially corrupt culture within Ghana’s law-enforcement community. But, of course, since I have not personally either seen and/or read the purported report, I can only go by the most logical reading of the contents of Mr. Apisawu’s flagrantly tendentious report. In other words, there can be no gainsaying the fact that the article captioned “Ghana’s Judiciary Is Corrupt – U. S. State Department” (Ghanaweb.com 8/24/10) was written by a diehard NDC media operative, most likely a press attaché with Ghana’s Washington embassy.
One thing is, however, glaring here – and it is the obviously elementary fact that it is the Inspector-General of Police (IGP), a bona fide member of the executive branch of the Atta-Mills government of the so-called National Democratic Congress, who controls the police service, and not Chief Justice Georgina Wood. And so if, indeed, the U. S. State Department is convinced about the prevalence of rank corruption among the ranks of the Ghana Police Service, then, it goes without saying that the onus rests squarely with the President of the August Republic of Ghana!
We must also bear in mind that the Ghana Police Service is the primary law-enforcement agency in the country. Likewise, the Narcotics Control Board, or NACOB, which specializes in the strict surveillance, apprehension and the prosecution of drug offenders, is a bona fide part of the executive branch of government.
There is also something at once facile and quaint about the following sentence culled from Mr. Apisawu’s article: “Despite the regular arrests of suspected narcotics traffickers, Ghana has a low rate of conviction, which many officials believe is likely due to corruption within the judiciary.” The problem here is that since the reporter does not give us (the reader) the ratio between drug arrests and prosecution, on the one hand, and the conviction and sentencing of drug offenders on the other, there is no objective way of validating the implicit claim of judicial reluctance.
At any rate, which “officials” are being alleged by Mr. Apisawu to have imputed the low rate of drug-offender conviction to “corruption within the judiciary”? In the absence of any definitive answers, we are forced to draw several plausible conclusions: The first of these regards the general caliber, or competence level, of prosecutors handling drug offences in Ghana. In other words, as we recently witnessed in the Mpiani-Wereko Brobbey case, Ghana’s current Attorney-General and Minister of Justice is arguably the most incompetent and least qualified citizen to hold the job. In the case alluded to above, for instance, Mrs. Betty Mould Iddrisu demonstrated abject lack of familiarity with Ghana’s 1992 Republican Constitution as well as a borderline cognition of legal interpretation. It has also not helped matters that Mrs. Iddrisu is crassly abrasive, clinically impulsive, obstreperously petulant, pathologically vindictive and agenda-driven.
Then there is also the quite serious matter of false arrests. In other words, how many of the alleged “regular arrests” actually involve the commission of provable crimes, as opposed to mere suspicion or circumstantial evidence? But, of course, being that Mr. Apisawu’s sole reportorial objective appears to be one of fanatical white-washing of the Atta-Mills government, while unremittingly damning the erstwhile Kufuor-led New Patriotic Party government (2000-8), the writer rather conveniently fails to point out that while, indeed, Chief Justice Georgina Wood had been appointed judicial head by President John Agyekum-Kufuor, in reality, most of Ghana’s current judges had been appointed by the Rawlings-led Provisional National Democratic Congress (P/NDC), a political juggernaut that has dominated most of the last three decades of Ghanaian politics!
Then also, Mr. Apisawu observes the following about the State Department report: “It further noted that in the first half of 2009, 62 kilograms of cocaine were seized by the law enforcement agencies[,] as against 33 kilograms seized [during the same period] in 2008. According to the report, the 2009 half-year cocaine seizure represented 89% more than the seizure made by the Kufuor Administration in the whole of 2008.”


Here again, the plausible explanation appears to be that in the relatively harsher economic environment presided over by the Atta-Mills government, as more and more Ghanaians have been driven to the margins of economic privation and outright destitution, coupled with an unemployment rate that hovers above 30-percent, drug dealing has become a choice quick-buck-making occupation. Thus more drug seizures under the Atta-Mills government could just well mean that more people are engaged in this contraband business than ever before.


*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 a Governing Board Member of the Accra-based Danquah Institute (DI) and the author of 21 books, including “Marlena: Sexual Indignities” (Atumpan Publications/Lulu.com, 2009). E-mail: [email protected].
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