The caption of the news story of “ ‘Constitutional Process for Removing Chief Justice Torkornoo Followed’ – Africa Judicial Independence Fund” Modernghana.com 4/30/25) is grossly and scandalously misleading because that is not what the detailed contents of the story tell readers and/or is about. Nonetheless, it was also quite intellectually and morally refreshing to learn that it is the continentally and internationally distinguished and the erudite Prof. Willy Mutunga, President Emeritus of the Supreme Court of the Sovereign Democratic Republic of Kenya, who chairs the Advisory Board of the Africa Judicial Independence Fund (AJIF), with Mr. Saeed Salahudeen named as the Fund Manager of the latter institutional establishment.
Personally, I know absolutely nothing about Mr. Saeed Salahudeen. Which is all well and kosher, because that is not what the present conversation is about, although I personally find the religious and the cultural background and the identity of the man, as clearly suggested by his name, to be one that provides a fair and balanced dimension to the aforementioned institutional establishment. Now, I make this observation intuitively and make absolutely no apologies for rather curiously and almost vacuously assuming such an ideological stance, in pretty much the same way and manner that I also found the long-established and strategically salutary partnership between former President Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo and Akwadum’s immediate former Vice-President, Alhaji Mahamudu Bawumia, to have both served Ghanaians in good stead as well as unimpeachably reflected the sort of regional and political balance that the Akwaduman people or “Akwadumians” direly needed going into the 2008 Presidential Election and well beyond.
But, of course, we are only talking about the topmost leadership rungs of the neoliberal market-oriented New Patriotic Party (NPP), presently Ghana’s main or most formidable organized opposition political party establishment. Now, when it comes to the leadership selection of bona fide Ghanaian citizens of the Islamic persuasion vis-a-vis the topmost electoral tickets of the faux-revolutionary and the ideologically populist and presently ruling National Democratic Congress (NDC), it is definitely a different ball game altogether. You see, for the movers and the shakers of the late Chairman Jeremiah “Jerry” John Rawlings (1947-2020)-founded National Democratic Congress, the foremost preference here is simply to strategically and mischievously make hay and a bumper humongous capital out of the much-coveted Muslim Vote, while doing absolutely nothing substantive or meaningful for our poverty-wracked Inner-City Zongo Communities, except to use the Annual Hajj Pilgrimage to Mecca as some sort of massive vote-harvesting jujitsu gimmickry. And boy does it work to magical effect!
The foregoing tack or political gimmickry is called “Out-Muslimming the Muslims.” For instance, even as I write, I have just learned about the massive construction of a Muslim Village by the National Democratic Congress-sponsored Mahama 2.0 regime in a locality that is reportedly not very far from the Kotoka International Airport (KIA), in the Akwaduman metropolis, presently misnamed the Sovereign Democratic Republic of Ghana by the immortalized putative Doyen of Gold Coast and Postcolonial Ghanaian Political Culture. I hope this politically expedient stunt does not also end up like the Akufo-Addo-fangled disastrous National Cathedral Boondoggle. We know for an unarguable fact that during the previous Mahama 1.0 regime, the Bole-Bamboi chieftain from the Akufo-Addo-created Savannah Region liaised with the Islamic Republic of Turkey to build a magnificent National Mosque which was once even patronized by then Vice-President Mahamudu Bawumia, vehement protestations about the Mahama government’s noninvolvement in the project notwithstanding.
But, of course, what I really wanted to highlight here and even right at the beginning of our present conversation is that, when it comes to the topic or the subject-matter of democratic leadership accountability, Kenya’s Chief Justice Emeritus Willy Mutunga has absolutely no rival or compeer in Continental Africa’s Judicial Establishment, and especially among the scandalously mediocre and the patently pedestrian and the Mahama bootlicking likes of Associate Justice Emeritus William Atuguba, the abjectly poor excuse of an Apex Court Jurist, who shamefully presided over the then Candidate Akufo-Addo-led 2012 Presidential-Election Petition and, together with some 8 other of his associates on the putative Supreme Bench, spent a historically unprecedented 8 months adjudicating the criminally rigged poll of the aforementioned year or electoral season, only to return a hocus-pocus verdict that has been globally impugned as the most inimitably kangaroo-esque and unspeakably amateurish snowjob of its kind anywhere among our 9 or 10 Solar Planetary System.
Ironically, in the wake of the equally amateurish and the scandalous and the politically motivated suspension of Chief Justice Gertrude Araba Esaaba Sackey-Torkornoo, Justice Emeritus William Atuguba was widely reported by the media to have, somehow, mustered the chutzpah to comically accuse Chief Justice Sackey-Torkornoo of having thoroughly and almost irreparably compromised the credibility and the integrity of the country’s judicial establishment. You see, it only took then Kenya’s Chief Justice Willy Mutunga a fleeting 8 weeks, or perhaps even less, as this author vividly recalls, to deliver a verdict that had the international community gaping and applauding and gasping with spellbinding astonishment, and that at the time was seismically hailed as one of the most astute and clinically seamless of its kind anywhere in the civilized democratic world.
In Kenya, with a much greater population diversity and a relatively cosmic proliferation of ethnic and sub-ethnic polities or groups, the post-election standoff had erupted between then Candidate Raila Odinga, a blood relative of former US President Barack H. Obama, and an incumbent President Uhuru Kenyatta, the “menopausal” offspring of Kenya’s first Independence-Era Leader, Mzee “The Kilimanjaro-Bearded” Jomo Kenyatta, and the much older son and the avuncular dauphin of that East African country’s first postcolonial Vice-President, namely, Mr. Oginga Odinga. Right here in Akwaduman, of course, the standoff was between then Candidate Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo and an Incumbent and an Interim-President John “European Airbus SE Payola” Dramani Mahama.
He did not say the following in plain English but it is baldly and crystal clear that 77-year-old Chief Justice Emeritus Willy Mutunga is well aware of the fact that the institutional independence of Akwaduman’s Judicial System and Establishment has perennially been under a relentless siege, ever since the grisly and the unspeakably barbaric Mafia-style orchestration of the midnight abduction and the summary assassination of the globally commiserated and commemorated Three Akan-Descended Accra High Court Judges in the Stygian Night of June 30, 1982, by the Rawlings-Tsikata Diarchy and the extortionate and human blood-guzzling junta of the Provisional National Defense Council (PNDC), the immediate and the direct institutional progenitor of the presently ruling Mahama-led National Democratic Congress.
Which was why, rather than speak or write the same in plain English, perhaps in order not to unnecessarily rattle the bones of the fast-aging leadership of Operation Death Incorporated, that is, the key operatives of President-General John “Gnassingbe” Dramani Mahama and the “Lt-Col” Johnson “The Mosquito” Asiedu-Nketia-captained Democracy-Demolition Squad, Retired Chief Justice Willy Mutunga suavely, albeit not-so subtly, pointed to the Political Hangman’s Noose that is Article 146 of Akwaduman’s 1992 Republican Constitution as the most efficient vehicle for the definitive resolution of the blatant and the morally depraved and unspeakably despicable attempt by the leadership of the Mahama-commandeered and chaperoned National Democratic Congress to scurrilously deprive the good and the longsuffering citizens of Akwaduman the salutary and the civilized rule of law and order.
But, of course, Chief Justice Mutunga ought to be already well aware of the fact that Article 146 of the Akwaduman Constitution had not been followed to the letter save in the breach; else, “Suspended” Chief Justice Gertrude Araba Esaaba Sackey-Torkornoo would not have first chanced across the at once cowardly and the dastardly attempt to dismiss her from the job at which she has proven herself to be far better qualified than Yagbonwura Kwame Gonja Tutumba may be deemed to be in the vulgarly carpeted Presidential Suite of our beloved Sovereign Democratic Republic of Akwaduman’s “Jubilant House” from a Social Media Portal post.
Yet, Prof. Mutunga had no better alternative than to simply address the Gonja Naaba in the sort of proverb-laden language that only the idiom and parable-spinning sagacious Uncle Mutunga perfectly weaves, Bonwire style. Which is that the Bole-Bamboi native, from the Akufo-Addo-created Savannah Region, would be much better off not committing certain political suicide in a rush but instead wait, squat fashion, by the bourgainvillea hedges around the John “The Gentle Giant” Agyekum-Kufuor-constructed Jubilee Golden-Stool House, until Sabarima Kwasi Agyeman Prempeh and his Freedom Search Party Tuners of the Akwadumanmu Fontomfrom Oath-Swearing Drum Batter-Head return from their Elephant-Hide’s Hunt. Wallahi-Tallahi! We ain’t budging!! We ain’t backing down!!!
By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., PhD
Professor Emeritus, Department of English
SUNY-Nassau Community College
Garden City, New York
May 1, 2025
E-mail: [email protected]
