Politicians Should Butt Out of Judicial Affairs!

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

It was the perennial flagbearer of the so-called National Democratic Congress (NDC) who started it all, and then all the other fanatical adherents of one-party dictatorships followed suit. The fact is that Mr. Tsatsu Tsikata’s sentencing to a 5-year prison term is the most lenient of verdicts, especially when one takes into consideration the convict’s direct and oblique complicity in the barbarous attempt by Mr. Rawlings and his henchmen, and women, to gut the country’s judicial system, beginning with the chilling abduction and summary execution of the three Ghanaian Supreme Court judges.

And so it is not clear exactly what the General-Secretary of the so-called People’s National Convention (PNC) means, when Mr. Bernard Mornah asserts that “the process of the trial, judgment and conviction of [Mr. Tsikata] ought to have been in accordance with due process” (see “PNC Concerned About Tsatsu’s Incarceration” Ghanaweb.com 9/9/08).

Needless to say, the preceding assertion by the chief scribe of the PNC would muster scrutiny if only Mr. Mornah could effectively explain to the Ghanaian public and the world, at large, precisely what makes the Fast-Track judicial system unconstitutional under Ghana’s Fourth-Republican dispensation. On the other hand, we need to recall for the edification of those of our citizens who were either not born or were too young to have appreciated the Kangaroo system of the Public Tribunals established by the so-called Provisional National Defense Council to carry out mass convictions and executions of “human elements” that Mr. Rawlings and the Tsikatas presumed to constitute something called “national security risk.”

Indeed, it constitutes the very height of absurdity for any responsible Ghanaian citizen, or rather anybody claiming such civic designation, to expect that incorrigible criminals like Mr. Tsikata ought to be allowed to freely circulate within Ghanaian society, in order to enable these “super special citizens” to continue perpetrating heinous crimes against their innocent and law-abiding compatriots. Actually, the Tsikata who ought to be sitting in the slammer, and literally hanging by his balls – or gonads – is Capt. Kojo Tsikata, the man who ought to have ensured the safety of the slain Supreme Court judges, as the P/NDC’s National Security Adviser, but instead chose the troglodytic path of ethnic cleansing. And so, in quite a plausible sense, Mr. Tsatsu Tsikata may be “half-aptly” envisaged as a scapegoat for the untold atrocities perpetrated against the Ghanaian people by the tandem governments of the so-called Provisional National Democratic Congress (P/NDC).

Interestingly, a New York City resident Ghanaian attorney and protégé of Prof. John Evans Atta-Mills who, reportedly, served as a PNDC Public Tribunal operative, recently wrote and published a patently desultory article calling for the immediate release of the duly convicted Mr. Tsikata on the fatuous grounds of national reconciliation. In sum, to this Atta-Mills lackey, “reconciliation” is virtually synonymous and interchangeable with effective and summary judicial nullification.

Ironically, in calling for the gratuitous release of Mr. Tsikata from a well-deserved incarceration, Mr. Mornah, the People’s National Convention’s general-secretary, also asserted, rather risibly, that such call did not necessarily imply that the PNC was “advocating that persons found guilty should not be punished.” If so, then why would Mr. Mornah presume to cavalierly instruct the Ghanaian judiciary over matters that the PNC scribe appears to have little or absolutely no expertise?

Then also, exactly what does the PNC’s Mr. Bernard Mornah mean by urging the Ghanaian judiciary to reverse itself in the Tsikata case, as a curious means of “redeeming its sinking image in the eyes of the public”? Really? And just who caused the image of the judiciary to sink to such abysmally low level, as the PNC scribe is claiming? The officially authorized assassins of the Ghanaian Supreme Court judges and their “revolutionary” paymasters, or these diligent and responsible judges who, in spite of such overwhelming odds as the foregoing, nevertheless, are able to courageously muster their critical and moral faculties in order to continue to admirably guarantee a semblance of justice, day-in and day-out, for those Ghanaians who, like the proverbial excaudate quadruped, have only Divine Providence to succor to their needs? Indeed, his call could not have come at a more opportune moment, when Attorney-General Joe Ghartey recently called for a thorough reexamination of the Tsikata case in order to ensure that the maximum and appropriate penalty allowable under the law was exacted on the notorious judicial nose-thumber, as it were.

What we see in the wake of Mr. Tsikata’s condign incarceration are shameless and unconscionable pressure groups composed, largely, of the very same people who eagerly collaborated with the P/NDC to cavalierly destroy the lives and livelihood of hardworking and law-abiding Ghanaian citizens, whose sole crimes appear to have simply been that they were hardworking and extremely professionally successful at what they did. And having brutally bullied their way into political usurpation and extra-constitutional entrenchment yesteryear, these pro-Tsikata pressure groups appear to believe that they can readily eviscerate the effective administration of justice simply by screaming ideological inanities and political profanities and sheer absurdities at the Ghanaian judiciary. And here, needless to say, these human cormorants and piranhas must be told in plain, simple but bold language that if, indeed, it takes a battle royal to guarantee justice and fair-play for all Ghanaians, without regard to economic status or station in life, than that is exactly what the Fourth-Republican national agenda ought to be about!

*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 the author of 18 books, including “Dr. J. B. Danquah: Architect of Modern Ghana” (iUniverse.com, 2005) and “Reena: Letters to an Indian-American Gal” (Atumpan Publications/lulu.com, 2008). E-mail: [email protected].