I Don’t Know About “Credibility” Here

By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.
Garden City, New York
Sept. 12, 2015
E-mail: [email protected]

I really don’t know that televising the disciplinary proceedings against the 34 judges and magistrates allegedly caught on audio- and videotapes compromising the ministration of justice and their own professional integrity would do any good to an irreparably bankrupt judicial system such as Ghana’s (See “Prof. Kwasi Prempeh Wants Hearing of ‘Bribed’ Judges Televised” MyJoyOnline.com / Ghanaweb.com 9/12/15). Let’s face it, Ghana is a failed nation! More so, when we are also being told that under the country’s Fourth-Republican Constitution, it is only junior judges whose professional misconduct could be subjected to public scrutiny. Criminal charges brought against High Court, Appeals Court and Supreme Court judges may only be heard in-camera or privately. The fact of the matter is that almost invariably, it is members of the upper-echelons of the judiciary who set the pace and tone of conduct for members on the lower rungs of the profession.

This is why already calls have gone out for the immediate resignation of Chief Justice Georgina Theodora Wood. I personally agree with those who think it is rather too early for such a call. First of all, we need to be let in on the details of the history of such rank culture of judicial corruption, and what measures have been taken against the same, prior to Mr. Anas Aremeyaw Anas’ exposé, before the performance of the Chief Justice can be fairly and objectively assessed. We also need to know and appreciate the circumstances under which Mrs. Wood was appointed to the highest judicial office of the land, and then what professional tone and climate she has induced since she assumed the glorious, and prestigious, mantle of judicial leadership in the country.

I personally am very interested in what role Chief Justice Wood has played or failed to play in the perennial and mega-scandal that is the judgment-debt regime of open-season on the wanton fleecing of our national capital resources and the Ghanaian taxpayer. She ought not to necessarily be personally found to be corrupt to determine whether Mrs. Wood has been up-and-doing or has been fast asleep on the job all this time of abject judicial venality. Seton Hall University’s Prof. Kwasi Prempeh may be perfectly accurate in observing that televising proceedings against the circuit judges and magistrates poignantly captured on audio- and videotape playing fast-and-loose with people’s lives is of great significance, because it is the members of the judiciary to whom we all turn to for the redressing of injustice meted us. And even more importantly, that in this instance, it is the judiciary that has shown itself to be a canker needing prompt lancing and definitive cauterization.

For me, though, the Ghanaian judiciary has been effectively dead and morally eviscerated since then-Chairman Jerry John Rawlings caused the barbaric abduction and summary execution of the three Akan-descended Accra High Court judges on June 30, 1982, and pointedly told the nation that henceforth instant justice was the new judicial order. I have already amply recounted the bloody events of that period in a previous column, and so I find no need to belabor the same here. Suffice it, however, to remark, at least in passing, that the Ghanaian judicial system effectively lost its credibility, or whatever might have been left of the same from previous eras, when Chairman Rawlings and his Abongo Boys opened the sluice gates of state-sponsored terrorism against it. And then since 1992, when the country embarked on a democratic system of governance, with an intransigent and dictatorial Chairman Rawlings, now re-designated President, it well appears that not only had a thoroughly politicized and wantonly compromised judiciary become hopelessly corrupt and morally bankrupt, it had also effectively become an executive-protected money bag suavely used to “legally” steal the people’s money.

It is roughly about this period that the state-fleecing regime of judgment-debt was officially inaugurated, whereby government attorneys seamlessly collaborated with foreign contractors to economically raze the country to Ground Zero. I sincerely don’t believe that utterly embarrassing and humiliating judges on television or media cameras – and come to think of it, junior judges at that – would serve any useful or meaningful purpose, least of all facilitate the restoration of the credibility of the country’s judicial system. That would take ages, at least the generation of our great-grandchildren, if at all. I really don’t want to sound unnecessarily pessimistic, but it is definitely a no-win situation. At least not in the foreseeable future.