When the Chief Executive Undermines the Judiciary

I have painfully watched President Kufuor creatively and courageously reconstruct the hitherto ramshackle Ghanaian economy as well as the country’s administrative culture, only to have Wofa Kofi Diawuo inexplicably and almost gratuitously undermine the very structural and institutional features (and/or landmarks) that stand the greatest chance of etching the otherwise enviable legacy of the first Fourth-Republican Ghanaian president of the twenty-first century into our national imagination.

One such faux-pas, if one excepts the President’s at once quizzical and counterproductive decision to allow the Road-Transport Minister, Dr. Richard W. Anane, to facilely and disdainfully trump the salutary tentacles of justice, is Mr. Kufuor’s recent granting of pardon to Mr. Dan K. Abodakpi, the National Democratic Congress’ Member of Parliament (MP) for the Anlo District, from duly serving a 10-year prison term handed down by Justice Faakye, a Ghanaian Supreme Court judge.

It may be recalled that Mr. Abodakpi, also a former Minister of Trade and Industry, was a prime collaborator in a racket that entailed the unconscionable siphoning of public funds, meant for national development, worth $ 400,000 (or ¢ 2.73 billion), into the private bank account of a Dr. Frederick Boadu, a Ghanaian technocrat resident in the United States (New Ghanaian 5/28/08). From the little that we have gathered regarding the Abodakpi scandal, Dr. Boadu had been contracted to serve as a consultant of a feasibility study with the long-term objective of establishing “a Science and Technology Community Park/Valley Project[,] which was meant to enhance the export of non-traditional products,” whatever that means.

That Mr. Abodakpi and some of his fellow parliamentarians and former cabinet members of the so-called National Democratic Congress (NDC) deemed it their bounden patriotic duty to deposit public development funds into the private bank account of a Ghanaian who, by all accounts, was a bona fide and integral part of the proverbial brain-drain conundrum, pretty much highlights the caliber of citizens Ghanaians are wont to encounter should the electorate commit the flagrant judgmental error of returning the Mills-Mahama-led National Democratic Congress to power.

Indeed, when we started composing this article, the least agenda on our mind entailed the inescapable “ethnicization” or “tribalization” of certain significant cabinet portfolios by the government of the so-called National Democratic Congress. For instance, it is curiously glaring that the Abodakpi scandal not only involved both the Trade and Finance ministries, and perhaps one or two other ministries, as key players in the scandal, the human culprits also disproportionately came from a certain ethnic minority group whose members were to hijack our national reins of governance, vengefully, in fact, for some two apocalyptic decades!

The preceding notwithstanding, the spotlight here squarely regards President Kufuor’s painfully flagrant and patently ill-advised attempt to expose an already-endangered Ghanaian judiciary to further professional devaluation and mayhem. And this state of affairs is nothing short of the downright disturbing, particularly when the avid student of postcolonial Ghanaian history and politics reckons the fact of the previous government, and tenure, of the so-called National Democratic Congress having prioritized the abject and systematic decimation of Ghana’s judiciary, including the deliberate orchestration of the persecution and summary execution of some of our finest Ghanaian judges.

And so, perhaps, any serious attempt to discuss the perennial question of brain-drain ought to, perforce, begin with the pernicious legacy of the Provisional National Democratic Congress (P/NDC), an abominable hive of pathological nation-wreckers who continue to seriously threaten the democratic and cultural development of Ghana.

That Mr. Kufuor, himself an Oxbridge-educated lawyer, and thus one who is expected to be more acutely aware of the dire implications of negative executive conduct vis-à-vis the judiciary, would so readily consent to flagrantly undermining public confidence in the judiciary, is insufferably regrettable.

The President’s quite curious decision to pardon Mr. Abodakpi, however, was not wholly unpredictable from the get go, as it were. And on this score must vividly be recalled the equally curious presidential riposte, in the wake of vehement NDC parliamentary protestation of the courageous Faakye verdict. Rather than allow the inviolable laws of the land to take their logical course, Mr. Kufuor, almost immediately and apologetically, exhorted the unruly posse of NDC protesters, led by Mr. Alban Bagbin, the notorious hooky-playing parliamentary opposition leader, to promptly appeal the verdict. It was almost as if to acknowledge, curiously somehow, that the presiding judge, Mr. Faakye, did not half-appreciate the legal vehicular framework upon which his verdict was predicated.

Back then, even one Accra newspaper editor-publisher, who also claims to rank among the vanguard membership of the ruling New Patriotic Party (NPP), but who had been a staunch political bedmate of Mr. Abodakpi’s not quite a while before, being also a recently-estranged in-law of Chairman Rawlings, in a pathetically halting editorial, had the temerity to impugn the judicial expertise of Justice Faakye.

Is it any wonder, therefore, that hundreds of intelligent young graduates of the Ghana Law School should prioritize a desire to escape the country on the day following their graduation, rather than staying home to practice their otherwise noble and enviable trade?

Ultimately, it begins to make perfect sense that big-time drug dealers, both Ghanaian and non-Ghanaian, would continue to perceive our country as an ideal haven in which to leisurely ply their violent and insidious trade. Of course, the preceding is in no way to imply that the neo-liberal Kufuor Administration has not done nearly enough to make life worth pursuing in Ghana. Rather, our unabashed contention is that the government needs to take the question of justice and judicial integrity more seriously than it appears to be doing presently.

*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 17 books, including “Ghanaian Politics Today” and “Selected Political Writings” (Atumpan Publications/lulu.com, 2008). E-mail: [email protected].