..... who must not practice Law in Ghana again!


By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.

I don’t know how Mr. David Annan got selected as a member of the Legal Team of the ruling National Democratic Congress (NDC), though it ought to make perfect sense to every reasonably well-educated and levelheaded Ghanaian, by now, that any political party that hires a clinical dullard like Mr. Annan is highly unlikely to come up successful in any worthwhile enterprise into which the services of such a professional misfit were engaged. It also ought to make perfect sense to many a well-meaning member of the Ghanaian public that the Mills-Mahama government should be losing almost every significant suit that it has brought before the august Ghanaian judiciary to-date. The third, and most morally crippling, embarrassment is that the borderline reasoning capacity of certified lawyers like Mr. David Annan does not creditably reflect on the quality of both legal schooling and practice in Ghana to the outside world; and the sooner such clinical cretins got disbarred, the better it would be for the image of Ghanaian legal practice abroad.
For those of our reading public who may not be privy to the preceding observations, Mr. David Annan is one of four lawyers who have been punitively cited for making unsubstantiated wild and personal allegations against the entire membership of the Ghanaian judiciary by the General Legal Council (GLC), that branch of the Ghanaian legal establishment charged with investigating accusations of misconduct and corruption leveled against members of the bench. The other three lawyers are Messrs. Raymond Atuguba, Larry Bimi and Abraham Amaliba.
So far, the reaction of some members of the Ghanaian judiciary has been to boycott cases presented to the bench by these four legal practitioners, until such time that the accusers have jointly and severally presented forensic evidence substantiating blanket allegations of rank corruption among the ranks of the entire membership of the Ghanaian judiciary.
And while the action of judges boycotting “The Crusading Four” may be aptly deemed to be unorthodox and even outright illegal, within the context of recent Ghanaian history, such action makes perfect defensive sense. And here may be promptly and logically recalled that on June 30, 1982, for instance, the government of the then-Provisional National Defense Council (PNDC), led by then-Chairman Jerry John Rawlings, systematically and savagely orchestrated the Mafia-style assassination of three Ghanaian Supreme Court judges for reasons that have yet to be fully explained to the general Ghanaian public. Since then, however, the now-former President Rawlings and his associates of the now so-called National Democratic Congress have not relented in their immitigable impugnation of the entire Ghanaian judicial system as one that is almost wholly composed of knaves whose main mode of operation is bribery and corruption.
In other words, notwithstanding the fact that in the past Mr. Rawlings caused the summary execution of some PNDC operatives, including a high-level cabinet member, for being allegedly responsible for the brutal assassination of the three Supreme Court judges and a retired senior Ghana Army major, the founding-pontiff of the P-NDC has, in scattered messages and metaphors, sought to justify the brutal butchery of Justices Koranteng-Addow, Sarkodie and Agyepong, as well as Major Sam Acquah as a salutary act of judicial housecleaning. And it is in a serious attempt at forestalling an imminent reprise of such heinous act of barbarism that a large section of the Ghanaian public has rallied in staunch support of the defensive actions of those members of the bench who have launched what appears to be an indefinite boycott of “The Crusading Four,” until the latter have been successfully prevailed upon by the General Legal Council to substantiate their blanket anti-judicial allegations.
We must also recall here, for the benefit of our readers, that “The Crusading Four” made their allegations regarding money-sack guzzling judges and magistrates in a forum sponsored by the National Commission for Civic Education (NCCE) to herald the annual “Constitution Week,” during which season ordinary Ghanaian citizens are media schooled about the modalities of the legal system and the fledgling democratic culture of Ghana’s Fourth Republic. In essence, in one fell swoop, what the four “gentlemen” of the bar achieved by their unsubstantiated allegations, was to simply trash the significance of the entire annual celebration of “Constitution Week,” thereby giving boost to the perennial and persistent NDC mainline gospel of the Ghanaian judicial system being better off proscribed.
The case of Mr. David Annan, however, is rather weird, for the accuser claims to have simply repeated the party line and thus ought not be found liable for professional misconduct by the General Legal Council (See “NDC Lawyer to Drag Judges Before Mills, Rawlings” Ghanaweb.com 5/21/11). Maybe somebody ought to inform Mr. Annan that, if, indeed, he was simply regurgitating the party mantra, with the approval of its executive members, then the entire NDC Legal Team had better substantiate Mr. Annan’s allegations or be prepared to end up in bankruptcy court.
As to whether in the obviously addled imagination of Mr. Annan, the membership of the General Legal Council, or even those engaged in a personal boycott of “The Crusading Four,” can be constitutionally rounded up and given a talking to by Messrs. Rawlings and Mills, remains to be seen.

*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 a Governing Board Member of the Accra-based Danquah Institute (DI) and the author, most recently, of “The Obama Serenades” (Lulu.com, 2011). E-mail: okoampaahoofe@optimum.net.
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