Sir John Is A Lawyer, Asiedu-Nketia Is Not!

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

Justice William Atuguba's expression of great displeasure with the grossly unprofessional manner in which some lawyers have been publicly misrepresenting judicial proceedings could not have come at a more opportune moment. In particular, Justice Atuguba was widely reported to have specifically named Mr. Abraham Amaliba, a member of the so-called NDC Legal Team, as one of the most guilty individuals. Needless to say, the latter caustically carping call could also not have come at a more opportune moment (See "'Why Did GBA Attempt To Stop Us When Lawyers Are Spewing Lies?' - Asiedu-Nketia" Peacefmonline.com 6/7/13).

Mr. Asiedu-Nketia is also dead-on-target in questioning why the scribes of the two major political parties in the country have been heavily criticized for inordinately politicizing their takes on the ongoing Akufo-Addo/New Patriotic Party petition, when even legally degreed and licensed lawyers who are supposed to be expert at the interpretation of judicial proceedings have clearly shown themselves to be, literally, out of their league on the issue in question.

Needless to say, it ought to be clear to Mr. Johnson Asiedu-Nketia by now that most of the mendacious spin on the ongoing petition hearings has come from a desperate-to-hang-onto-power National Democratic Congress. And this obviously explains why Justice Atuguba, a man widely known to be sympathetic towards the ruling party, singled out a member of the NDC Legal Team for carping.

We must also quickly point out that whereas Mr. Kwadwo Owusu-Afriyie, the general-secretary of the main opposition New Patriotic Party (NPP), is a trained and practising lawyer, the NDC's chief scribe is not. Indeed, when he recently mounted the witness-box in the ongoing presidential election petition hearings nearly a fortnight ago, Mr. Asiedu-Nketia quite laudably exhibited his rural-banking expertise vis-a-vis the so-called pink sheets, the evidentiary key to the statistical accuracy of the conduct of Election 2012, albeit in a clearly extraneous manner.

What I find utterly distasteful about the entire subject under discussion, is that the national executive membership of the Ghana Bar Association (GBA) ought to have issued a disciplinary and/or cautionary directive reining in wayward lawyers long before Justice Atuguba felt compelled to do just that.

This apparent lethargy clearly does not reflect creditably on the caliber of the men and women who administer the affairs of the GBA. And so, hopefully, Justice Atuguba's rather mature and constructive call will be promptly heeded by the executive membership of the Ghana Bar Association.

This quite well-meaning call, however, ought not to put a damper on the right of all Ghanaian citizens - legal experts and non-legal experts alike - to freely, democratically and publicly express their views on the raging Akufo-Addo Revolution.

What we have here is a psychological warfare, a clearly legitimate aspect of the post-presidential election fraud that took place in the country last December. This veritable extraneous concomittant to the Atuguba Court's petition hearings, of course, is just that. What is clear, though, is the fact that no critical thinker who has been studiously following events in the court-room has any doubt regarding the fact that what transpired at the polls in Ghana on December 7 and 8 was anything but the finest, fairest and the most transparent of its kind in the post-colonial history of sub-Saharan Africa's oldest modern polity.

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*Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.
Department of English
Nassau Community College of SUNY
Garden City, New York
June 7, 2013
E-mail: [email protected]
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