The recent opinion survey conducted by the Ghana Chapter of Global InfoAnalytics, the renowned market research and polling establishment, in which some 52-percent Ghanaians were alleged to be staunchly supportive of President John “European Airbus SE Payola” Dramani Mahama, the publicly declared “Peerless” Ghanaian leader’s Banana-Republic Attempt to have Chief Justice Gertrude Esaaba Sackey-Torkornoo summarily removed from office, may be far more reflective of the immediate post-2024 general election mood and climate of the country as a whole, than anything directly or meaningfully to do with either the professional caliber or the administrative competence of the subject of dismissal or removal (See “Majority of Ghanaians Want CJ Removed Even Without Knowing Her Offense – Mussa Dankwah” Modernghana.com 4/20/25).
Coming right on the heels of the rancorous and bitter debate that gripped the country in the runup to the 2024 General Election, on the question of the premature declaration of some four parliamentary seats whose primary-defeated occupants had declared their intention of leaving the parties by whose sponsorship they had originally gained access to our august National Assembly and, instead, to run for a retention of their House Seats as Independent Candidates, may very well have boosted the long-premeditated attempt by Mr. Mahama to predictably and vindictively remove the Akufo-Addo-appointed Chief Justice Sackey-Torkornoo.
The foregoing incident or event may also have been afforded further boost by the widely perceived and vehemently protested or caustically castigated alacrity with which the Chief Justice had acted to promptly ensure that Parliamentary Speaker Alban S. K. Bagbin, and his lockstepping then-opposition National Democratic Congress’ hawkish associates did not unconstitutionally finagle their way into a declaration of the wantonly and the infamously extra-judicially motivated, state-capturing apparatchiks of the latter political party as a skin-of-tooth Parliamentary Majority Caucus in the twilight days of Ghana’s 8th Parliament and the frenetic runup to the 2024 General Election.
Some critics and observers of the country’s Fourth Republican political scene, perhaps with a modicum of good reasoning, found the Chief Justice to have acted rather curiously and a bit indiscreetly or without tact, in view of the fact that there existed other equally pressing or perhaps even more significant matters on the Apex Court’s calendar that ought to have been accorded juridical or judicial priority. We, however, vehemently beg to differ with the latter group of critics and observers for the simple reason that the storm-in-teacup impasse that raged between Speaker Bagbin and Mr. Alexander Afenyo-Markin, the extant New Patriotic Party’s Parliamentary Majority Leader, was one that directly hinged on a specific and a rhetorically unmistakable interpretation of Ghana’s 1992 Republican Constitution and therefore deserved justiciable priority, especially in view of the virtual “Hung Status” of the country’s 8th Parliament.
Now, where matters may quite aptly have been perceived to have been untactfully handled by the Chief Justice, regards the glaring semblance of a conflict-of-interest dilemma, for the simple reason that aside from having been appointed President of the Supreme Court of Ghana by the New Patriotic Party-sponsored then-President Akufo-Addo, Mrs. Sackey-Torkornoo and the plaintiff of the lawsuit that promptly sought an immediate and a definitive interpretation of the relevant portions of the Constitution pertaining thereto or thereunto, whatever the case may be, also happened to hail from the same township – of Winneba – in the Central Region, and the same ethnic or sub-ethnic polity. But then, practically speaking, this situation was fundamentally no different from the William Atuguba-presided Apex Court Panel that adjudicated the Akufo-Addo, Bawumia and Obetsebi-Lamptey-led 2012 Presidential-Election Petition.
Other than the preceding somewhat bizarre or, more appropriately, situationally awkward position, on a purely personal level, by the way, the hermeneutic twist/spin or interpretation proffered by the University of Ghana’s Law Faculty Alumna was decidedly smack on target. Maybe what the unimpeachably scholastic authority on Property-Inheritance Law, among a score of other legal specialties or sub-specialties, if memory serves this writer accurately, ought to have done should have been to recuse herself from the Afenyo-Markin Suit and, instead, had one of her Apex Court Associates adjudicate the matter, in pretty much the same manner that Chief Justice Emeritus Georgina Theodora Wood had done in the aforementioned globally infamous Akufo-Addo, Bawumia and Obetsebi-Lamptey-led lawsuit that had been royally botched in the judicially unprecedented travesty that was what has come to be commonly known as “Atugubatricks.”
But here, also, it is not certain whether the right judgment call would have been made, in view of the fact that Chief Justice Wood’s all too legitimate and professionally clinical and ethical recusal of herself from adjudicating the 2012 Presidential-Election Petition had flagrantly resulted in the equally untenable travesty that was the Kangaroo-esque Decision handed down by the Associate Justice William Atuguba-presided Apex Court Panel of Jurists of the 2012 Presidential-Election Petition. Had Chief Justice Wood decided otherwise, the rancorous political climate at the time would almost definitely have ensured that, like her present successor three tenures removed, to wit, “Suspended Chief Justice” Sackey-Torkornoo, the now Chief Justice Emerita Wood would have ended up becoming the lightning rod that the Cape Coast-born Winneba native, from the Central Region, has presently become.
Even so, the very fact that a significant 48-percent of the InfoAnalytics polling respondents are reported to be either strongly opposed, indifferent or neutral to the alleged petitions seeking the summary removal and/or the dismissal of Chief Justice Sackey-Torkornoo, is in of itself strongly reflective of the fact that almost a moiety or half of the country’s population is convinced that whatever perceptions of the shortcomings of Ghana’s judicial system have clearly far less to do with the individual caliber or the professional competence or any lack thereof, for that matter, of Chief Justice Gertrude Araba Esaaba Sackey-Torkornoo than they conspicuously have to with the functional integrity of the judicial system and institutional establishment as a whole.
Now, it absolutely goes without saying that the same case could be made for the institutional establishment of the Presidency and the functionally bastardized and politically and administratively stultifying Legislature. Ghanaians need to be clearly and obviously far more focused on the radical and the salutary reconfiguration of the most sacred and the highest governance instrument of our democratic culture, far more studiously than superficially and sophomorically and inadvisably attempting to scapegoat the Chief Justice for the inherently dysfunctional foibles of the Rawlings-tailored 1992 Faux-Republican Constitution. Ours is unarguably a Banana-Republic Constitution meant for fast-rising dictators like President Mahama and his junta associates in the ECOWAS region and beyond. In short, lambent-witted legal lights and luminaries like Mrs. Sackey-Torkornoo and Mrs. Wood deserve our gratitude and sympathy, not our contempt and disdain.
By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., PhD
Professor Emeritus, Department of English
SUNY-Nassau Community College
Garden City, New York
E-mail: [email protected]
