I just finished reading Peter Martey Agbeko’s rather brief and interesting but practically short on discursive and logical gravitas piece titled “Suspending the Chief Justice… a Nation at the Crossroads of Conscience and Precedent” (See “PETE’s CORNER with Peter Martey Agbeko, APR” Business & Financial Times 4/28/25), and could barely contain my impatience and utter frustration with the author’s failure to clearly distinguish the statutorily unarguable coordinate portfolio of the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of Ghana (SCOG) and the Presidency, on the one hand, from that of the Chairperson of Ghana’s Electoral Commission (EC).
As I briefly pointed out to the very dear and well-respected renowned friend who made the afore-referenced column available to Yours Truly via WhatsApp messaging last night, the premises upon which Mr. Agbeko predicates the thrust of his argument is egregiously and inescapably wrongheaded. And for the simple reason that the Judicial Establishment of which Chief Justice Gertrude Araba Esaaba Sackey-Torkornoo is the Highest-Ranking Officer/Official, is clearly delineated in Ghana’s 1992 Republican Constitution as one of the Three Coordinate or Co-Equal Branches of our Democratic Governance System of Checks-and-Balances, comprised of the Executive, of which President John “I Have No Classmates in Ghana” Dramani Mahama is currently the Head.
Then, of course, we have the Legislative Arm of our Government, or Parliament, of which Speaker Alban Sumana Kingford Bagbin is currently the Head; and then we have the Judicial Establishment, or our court system, as a whole of which the recently scandalously suspended Chief Justice Sackey-Torkornoo is President and Commander-in-Chief.
Now, while, indeed, the President of The Republic, as the Chief Executive of “Akwadum” is also popularly known, is statutorily invested with both the power to appoint and remove both the Chief Justice and the Chairperson of Electoral Commission (EC), in terms of status and stature, the Chief Justice is endowed with “definitive” and “arbitral” interpretive authority of our statutes and fundamental instruments of governance that are unavailable to both the “Executors” of our laws – that is, the Presidency – and the “Makers” or the “Fabricators” of our laws, commonly and popularly known as “Legislators,” “Parliamentarians” or “Representatives of the People.”
The preceding observation is absolutely not in any way meant to relatively deprecate or downplay the seriousness or the significance of the glaringly politically motivated set of circumstances that are widely perceived by some Ghanaian critics and political-party partisans, from both major parties in the country, to have culminated in the unfortunate but not altogether unexpected, removal of Mrs. Charlotte Kesson-Smith Osei, the Mahama-appointed former Chairperson of the Electoral Commission, by the twice consecutively elected former President Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo.
Now, for us to fully appreciate the complex concatenation of factors leading up to the highly emotionally charged and the politically fraught removal of Mrs. Charlotte Osei from her statutorily entrenched or protected tenure and position as the “Independent” Electoral Commission’s Chairperson, Ghanaians need to fully and objectively appreciate the fact that in arbitrarily transferring Mrs. Osei from the statutorily lateral and/or coordinate office of the then extant Chairperson of the National Commission for Civic Education (NCCE) to the Electoral Commission (EC), as renowned legal expert Prof. Kofi Abotsi pointed out at the time, President Mahama flagrantly violated a clearly defined constitutional diktat or stipulation that categorically counseled against such arbitrary removal and/or transfer of any duly appointed and officially sworn Head of any of the seven, or so, statutorily entrenched Commissions and Institutional Establishments, which would have included the Commissions for Human Rights and Administrative Justice (CHRAJ) and the National Media Commission (NMC).
Then also, we need to factor into the equation or the debate, the long and rankly corrupt tenure of the National Democratic Congress-appointed Dr. Kwadwo Afari-Gyan, as the same came to light during the proceedings of the Akufo-Addo-led 2012 Presidential-Election Petition, in particular the patently unhealthy atmosphere and climate of suspicion and the complete loss of confidence and trust in both the integrity of the person of Dr. Afari-Gyan and the very institutional establishment of the Electoral Commission, on the part of the overwhelming majority of Ghana’s electorate and the citizenry at large. In other words, then as now, President Mahama clearly had an agenda well beyond constitutional edict in transferring Charlotte Osei from the Chairship of the National Commission for Civic Education to the Electoral Commission.
Making a major and a glaringly undue capital out of the Female Gender Identity of both Chief Justice Sackey-Torkornoo and the Akufo-Addo-dismissed Mrs. Osei, within the critical context of the country’s male-dominated political culture does not get any critic very far, although the obvious significance of patriarchal political tyranny in Fourth-Republican Ghana, especially under National Democratic Congress-sponsored regimes, cannot be lightly ignored or overemphasized. Ironically, however, many Mahama partisans may be loath to frankly and candidly admit the fact that it has almost invariably been under the tenure of the faux-feminist propaganda-addicted National Democratic Congress that highly positioned Ghanaian women public servants and officials have come under the most blistering open season of inordinate administrative scrutiny, inexorable harassment and politically motivated persecution. We witnessed the most striking example of such gender-related baiting and morally and politically regressive torment under the tenure of Retired Chief Justice Georgina Theodora Wood, when nearly every key female cabinet appointee in the previous Mahama government euphorically rallied against the country’s longest-serving Chief Justice, in cahoots with the NDC-hired and sponsored Montie Three/Montie Trio Media Goons, to literally demand the head of Mrs. Wood on a diamond platter.
Ultimately, the kind of ratiocinative sophistry being so cavalierly purveyed by even apparently well-meaning critics and pundits like Peter Martey Agbeko is highly unlikely to move the needle of constructive engagement and the democratic development of Fourth Republican Ghanaian Political Culture an inch, unless the seemingly salutary promotion of gender equality is also seriously and objectively underlain by a genuine sense of social justice. So far, Peter Martey Agbeko’s analysis of the inescapable and completely unnecessary constitutional crisis provoked by President Mahama’s professionally unjustified decision to dismiss the Chief Justice woefully lacks evidential gravitas.
The correct judgment call presently, is for the President to promptly and immediately reinstate an astute, diligent and a professionally unimpeachably performing Chief Justice Gertrude Araba Esaaba Sackey-Torkornoo with unqualified apology. A politically “Born Again” President Mahama needs to man up and humbly face up to the inescapable reality of his morally and politically egregious judgment call. We are, each and every one of us, incurably human and fallible. God Bless Our Homeland, Ghana!
By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., PhD
Professor Emeritus, Department of English
SUNY-Nassau Community College
Garden City, New York
April 29, 2025
E-mail: [email protected]
