Office of independent prosecutor works!

Scarcely a week ago, the owner and 2016 presidential candidate of the Progressive People’s Party (PPP), Dr. Papa Kwesi Nduom, came out swinging against then-President-Elect Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo’s policy proposal for the establishment of the Office of an Independent Special Prosecutor, in order to significantly reduce the high spate of corruption and theft among public office holders and people in prominent positions of trust in government.

Dr. Nduom is a man who acquired his college education here in the United States of America. He is also known to own businesses in Mid-Western America, where he schooled through most of the 1970s. So one hopes that he paid sedulous attention to what happened here on January 2, 2017.

By here, of course, I am referring to the United States’ Federal House of Representatives, otherwise known as the Lower-House of the United States’ Congress. Instead of the establishment of the Office of the Independent Special Prosecutor, Dr. Nduom has proposed the “decoupling” or splitting up of the cabinet portfolio of the Attorney-General and Minister of Justice into the Ministry of Justice and the Office of the Attorney-General.

He would have the Minister of Justice become exclusively the defender of the President and his appointees, while the Attorney-General concentrates on defending the interests of the people. He very likely got this idea from the set up and operations of the Attorneys General of the individual states that make up the “Union” or the United States of America.

Presently, the United States has 50 State Attorneys General, but the latter are still superseded by the Attorney-General and Minister of Justice in Washington, DC.

Like the case of Ghana, presently, the Attorney-General of the United States is also Head of the U.S. Justice Department. But the Attorney-General is not called the “Secretary” of Justice, as most of his fellow cabinet appointees are called, although s/he wears both the hats of the Attorney-General and the Secretary of Justice.

In Ghana, I don’t see how a Justice Ministry would function discretely from the Office of the Attorney-General, when both portfolios are composed of government, or publicly salaried, lawyers, as opposed to one’s acquisition of one’s own private lawyer(s) or even a government-salaried Office of the Public Defender.

He may not know this, but the Office of the Public Defender, existent in most of the 50 states of the Union, has not been known for either its functional efficiency or its professional quality of performance.

It is chronically underfunded and nearly wholly composed of pro-bono attorneys, or volunteer lawyers who work without salaries, which means that these lawyers have full-time jobs, for the most part, aside from their professionally required pro-bono services.

My longtime private attorney, for example, doubles on Fridays and some weekends as a judge of the Family Court system in one of the five boroughs of New York City. From time to time, we hear of widespread injustice done to America’s poor and destitute who had the misfortune of being represented in court by Public Defenders.

Because the offices of public defenders are invariably woefully underfunded throughout the Union or all 50 States, their clients never receive the desired quality of justice. Lawyers often lack the financial and other capital resources to conduct the necessary investigations and research required to be able to put up the best defense for their clients, with the predictably unsavory result that legion cases have had to be reopened and re-tried because the Public Defenders could not perform at par.

Well, what happened on Monday, January 7, 2017, and that which motivated the composition of this column, was the decision by the Republican Party’s majority in the Lower-House of the United States’ Congress to scrap the Independent Congressional Office of Ethics (See “House Republicans, Under Fire, Back Down on Gutting Ethics Office” New York Times 1/3/17).

The strategy undergirding the decision to scrap the Independent Congressional Office of Ethics was the secret voting or conspiracy by Republican congressional representatives to get rid of funding for this autonomous office.

Well, contrary to what Dr. Nduom would have Ghanaians believe, the Independent Congressional Office of Ethics was being scrapped not because it had been grossly negligent or deficient in its performance, since its statutory establishment in 2008. No! Rather, it was being abolished primarily because its conscientious, incorruptible and relentless operatives had sent too many Republican congressional representatives to jail.

I would not be surprised if Dr. Nduom followed the foregoing event and promptly decided to revise his opinion on the efficacy of the Office of the Independent Special Prosecutor. The good news here, though, is that barely 24 hours after working to quash the existence of the Independent Congressional Office of Ethics, there erupted such a firestorm of public outrage that the Republican congressional coup-plotters had to reverse their move.