Shame On You, Cousin Atta-Akyea!

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

By the way, I did not intend the caption of this article to mean exactly what it says. It was only intended to advisorily alert you to the fact that you may be spreading yourself too thinly to be as professionally effective as you need to be. The job of a parliamentarian, if conscientiously and deligently executed, is already more than a handful; so what is this jack-of-all-trades tack about?

I mean, you did a superb, near-genius, work with the Ya-Na scapegoating charade concocted by the late President John Evans Atta-Mills and his associates and lackeys; so why are you now trying to vitiate all of that with this embarrassingly sloppy representation of Ken Kuranchie before the highest court of the land? Couldn't you have detailed the same to a more media-savvy legal associate?

It is all well and good that his 10-day incarceration will not be officially placed on the Daily Searchlight newspaper editor's record. But I just want you to look at this avoidably pathetic situation from a more pragmatic angle: which is the fact that nobody alive and old enough to remember today is not likely to forget it anytime soon. I also don't fancy the idea of having Mr. Kuranchie moved from Nsawam to Ho; you know that part of our country is no protective custodial facility for the likes of us. Sometimes I even forget that that spooky neighborhood is an integral part of the country, particularly if you also happen to believe in democracy as our forebears staunchly and stoutly defended the same with their very lives.

In other words, it clearly appears to me that the Ho relocation, or transfer, of Mr. Kuranchi is more the brunt of the latter's 10-day custodial sentence than the temporal span of the sentencing itself. Still, I don't think that anybody ought to be smug about the fact that challenging the fairness of the sentence would have taken more time than its being served. That is not the point; the point of such challenge is simply to publicly alert the judiciary at large of the fact that the "Supremacy" of the Supreme Court of Ghana squarely inheres in its irreproachable ministration of justice and defence of the inalienable right of the individual to unfettered public self-expression, however odious and even invidious such tenor of self-expression may be deemed.

But I was even more embarrassed, practically on the verge of downright mortification, to hear you, my brother, 'fess up publicly that it was actually Justice Dotse, one of the jurists hearing the Akufo-Addo/NPP Election 2012 Petition, who practically put up a spirited defense for Ken Kuranchie, by pointing out the fact that the accused's case ought to have first been referred to the Attorney-General (by who?) "who would then have had to file a motion inviting a response from your client" (See "Justice Has Not Been Done; I Am Disappointed - Atta-Akyea" JoyOnline.com / Ghanawe.com 7/3/13).

A careful interpretation of Justice Dotse's observation points to two fascinating issues. And it is the fact that both of you, Messrs. Atuguba and Atta-Akyea, may have amateurishly conducted yourselves in your methodical tack to clearly established protocol. And this is the reason why I wish you could also be named a Supreme Court justice in the offing. After all, adding one more "judicial amateur" to the pack would only go a long way to vindicate my long-held conviction vis-a-vis the caliber of men - and I mean ONLY THE MEN - routinely selected by judicial mavens like Chairman Rawlings to firm up the democratic rule of law and order in our beloved Motherland.

Anyway, I hope you have been doing comfortably well - the "forensic" evidence of your puffy cheeks betray this very fact - since we last saw one another in 1975 or thereabouts. All this is tongue-in-cheek, of course. You know I am simply too solicitous of your well-being to roast you like a spitted boar, precisely as I am doing here right now.

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*Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.
Department of English
Nassau Community College of SUNY
Garden City, New York
July 3, 2013
E-mail: [email protected]
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