It is downright absurd and inexcusably despicable for Mr. Martin Kpebu, the notorious apparatchik of the presently ruling National Democratic Congress (NDC), to presumptuously and self-righteously accuse Mrs. Efua Ghartey, President of the Ghana Bar Association (GBA), of being ultra-vires or out-of-order and politically partisan, and therefore woefully bereft of any moral authority to call the historically and globally infamous and democratically destructive suspension of Chief Justice Gertrude Araba Esaaba Sackey-Torkornoo by the Anti-Judicial Establishment 2.0 government of President John “European Airbus SE Payola” Dramani Mahama into question, and by also opportunely and appropriately demanding that the “Thoroughgoing Officially Corrupt” Mr. Mahama – at least by the indelible lights of the late President Jeremiah “Jerry” John Rawlings, the universally acclaimed Founding-Father of the National Democratic Congress – promptly review and immediately revoke the democratically unorthodox and flagrant overthrow of the democratic principle of checks-and-balances and the veritable constitutional crisis that has resulted from the indefinite suspension of Chief Justice Sackey-Torkornoo (See “You’re NPP Supporter; this Should Be the Last Time You’ll[sic] Talk about CJ Removal – Kpebu Tells GBA Prez” Modernghana.com 7/5/25),
The morally and the politically untenable suspension of Chief Justice Gertrude Sackey-Torkornoo eerily recalls the equally historically unprecedented and politically destructive dismissal of Ghana’s first postcolonial Chief Justice of the august Supreme Court of Ghana (SCOG), Sir Kobina Arku Korsah (1894-1967), from Saltpond, in the Central Region, primarily and essentially because an implacably autocratic and politically dictatorial President Kwame Nkrumah was incensed by the acquittal of the prime suspects implicated in the globally infamous Kulungugu Assassination Attempt on the life of the Achimota Teacher-Training College and the Lincoln University and the University of Pennsylvania-educated Mr. Kwame Nkrumah. Of the five prime suspects promptly rounded up and arraigned before the Apex Court for high-treason prosecution, three were promptly acquitted. Now, I don’t quite recall the finer details regarding this trial, except the fact that most of the criminal suspects were also cabinet members of Nkrumah’s own Convention People’s Party (CPP) government. For a more comprehensive overview of the proceedings of the Kulungugu Treason Trial, read Sir Geoffrey Bing’s “Reap The Whirlwind” (London: MacGibbon and Kee, 1968).
Curiously, however, in recent years, predictably mendacious attempts have been made by some Nkrumaist revisionist pseudo-historians, largely in the pay of Ghana’s presently ruling political party, the National Democratic Congress (NDC), to fully and totally blame the clearly and purely internal conspiracy to assassinate an increasingly extortionate and dictatorial President Nkrumah on the Danquah, Busia and the Dombo-led main opposition United Party (UP), the immediate antecedent or ideological and institutional parent of the Prime Minister Kofi Abrefa Busia-led Progress Party (PP). Now, what is significant to note here, by way of a teachable historical lesson, is the incontrovertible fact that the summary dismissal of Chief Justice Arku Korsah was one of the major reasons given by the leaders of the National Liberation Council (NLC) junta for the unimpeachable justification for the violent overthrow of both President Nkrumah and the effective proscription of the institutional establishment of the rankly corrupt and faux-socialist Convention People’s Party.
The tragic irony here is that the now-President Mahama, whose own late father, Mr. Emmanuel Adama Mahama (1917-2001), served as a Non-Cabinet Minister of the CPP for the Old Northern Region, does not seem to have learned any politically worthwhile or progressive lessons from the foregoing catastrophic event. It is a tragic irony because the Younger Mister Mahama officially prides himself as a vanguard historian of Postcolonial Ghana, although he quite disturbingly does not seem to have learned any worthwhile or politically and ideologically meaningful lessons from Postcolonial Ghanaian History. He also clearly and pathetically and, perhaps, even pathologically as well, does not seem to appreciate the fact that in so inadvisably and recklessly suspending Chief Justice Gertrude Sackey-Torkornoo, he has also effectively invalidated Ghana’s Fourth Republican Democratic Culture, thus equally justifying any misguided attempt to forcibly remove him from office.
You see, in so unwisely and recklessly suspending Chief Justice Sackey-Torkornoo from office, the fundamental democratic mechanism of Checks-and-Balances has been effectively and inexcusably unhinged, which also means that blindly and retributively or vindictively invoking Article 146 of Ghana’s 1992 Fourth-Republican Constitution is highly unlikely to continue to justify the legitimacy of his office. In other words, gleefully unbeknownst to the former Arch-Lieutenant to the late President John Evans “Atta-Woyome” Mills, the Bole-Bamboi native, from the Akufo-Addo-created Savannah Region, has almost irrevocably and irreversibly signed a politically suicidal pact, having been almost hermetically blindsided by his infamously renowned great appetite and insatiable taste for revenge and personal vendetta, irrespective of the righteousness or the absolute and the abject lack thereof.
Now, what an equally politically blind Mr. Kpebu scandalously fail to appreciate is that Ghana’s 1992 Republican Constitution does not absolutely in any way preclude Mrs. Efua Ghartey from exercising her inalienably democratic choice of belonging to or affiliating herself with either of the country’s two major political parties, namely, the presently ruling National Democratic Congress and the country’s main opposition New Patriotic Party. Or any of the dozen, or so, legitimately registered political parties in the country, for that matter. Now, what the foregoing analysis means is that rather than jejunely or sophomorically taking ad-hominem shots at the legitimately elected President of the Ghana Bar Association, Mr. Kpebu would be much better off debating and/or subjecting the details of the contents of Mrs. Efua Ghartey’s all-too-righteous appeal to President Mahama’s sense of constitutional and governance protocol to scrutiny, and then constructively drawing his own conclusions strictly on the legal basis of the merits and/or the demerits of the GBA President’s argument or submission. That is what good and civically responsible statesmen and stateswomen do. NDC’s globally infamous tactic of bullying their most formidable political and ideological opponents into cowardly submission is not apt to work here.
By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., PhD
Professor Emeritus, Department of English
SUNY-Nassau Community College
Garden City, New York
E-mail: [email protected]
