ASEPA Request on Justice Dotse Is Flagrantly Untenable

It is a petition that may very well be absolutely Dead-on-Arrival (DoA). We are here, of course, alluding to the alleged petition that has been supposedly filed with the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of Ghana (SCOG), Mr. Kwasi Anin-Yeboah, by the Executive-Director of the Civil Society Organization (CSO) called Alliance for Social Equity and Public Accountability (ASEPA), that seeks to preclude Justice Jones Dotse, the highly respected Associate Justice of the SCOG, from any judicial panel that is established to adjudicate the 2020 Presidential-Election Petition that has reportedly been just filed by Candidate John “Akonfem-Kanazoe” Dramani Mahama, the immediate-past President of the Sovereign Democratic Republic of Ghana.

The grounds that Mr. Mensah Thompson gives for having Justice Dotse excluded from any adjudicatory panel established for the redressing of the Mahama-filed Presidential-Election Petition, has to do with widespread rumors that Justice Dotse is being considered for appointment as Speaker of Parliament by President Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo (See “Election Petition: Don’t Empanel Justice Jones Dotse – ASEPA Petitions CJ” Kasapa FM / Ghanaweb.com 12/30/20). On the foregoing count must be promptly observed that Justice Dotse, one of the most senior members on the SCOG, was also one of the members of the panel of nine, or so, jurists that adjudicated the 2012 Presidential-Election Petition that was filed by Messrs. Akufo-Addo, Mahamudu Bawumia and the late Jake Otanka Obetsebi-Lamptey. Back then, of course, Justice Dotse was not being considered for the post of Speaker of Parliament or another equally significant post of major public responsibility.

But that is clearly not the real issue at stake here, which is that Justice Dotse was the frank and forthcoming jurist who famously described the kleptocratic and thoroughgoing corrupt leadership of the National Democratic Congress as a criminal gang of unconscionable nation-wreckers whose sole and foremost agenda or political raison d’étre was simply to “Create, Loot and Share” the scarce collective wealth of the Ghanaian citizenry at large. In other words, the Ewe-descended Justice Dotse is not known the least bit to either indulge or entertain the kind of “Judicial Tribalism” or crusading political agenda that came to be infamously associated with the likes of Justices Francis Yaonasu Kpegah and William Atuguba, in recent memory. But even more significantly and a factor that may very well have informed ASEPA’s Mr. Thompson’s petition to have Justice Dotse summarily excluded from the Mahama-led Election 2020 Presidential-Election Petition, is the fact that in the verdict handed down by the 2012 Atuguba panel, Justice Dotse roundly and, some say, virulently voted against the then-Interim President Mahama.

It is very likely that his was one of the verdicts that were widely reported by the media, citing a Nigerian Ford Foundation Scholar who was researching the anatomy and contours of the 2012 Atuguba-presided Presidential-Election Petition, to have been deliberately changed or reversed several times by either the clerk of the Apex Court or somebody officially closely connected with the same, only to have the “anti-Mahama verdicts” promptly and almost immediately reverted to their original status or stance. You see, Justice Dotse is the one Apex Court jurist that the Mahama Posse of inveterate anti-judicial establishment detractors love to hate with a vengeance. And this is clearly the motive of the pathologically pro-Mahama and pro-NDC ASEPA Executive-Director for seeking to have Justice Dotse summarily excluded from the 2020 Presidential-Election Petition.

It goes without saying that such Machiavellian pretext could not at once be more flimsy and inexcusably preposterous because, short of any real or concrete evidence of gross professional incompetence, it simply staggers our imagination why ASEPA’s Mr. Thompson would so mischievously and cavalierly presume to impugn the integrity and credibility of one of the country’s most astute and erudite jurists, even while pretending as if such frivolous petition for preclusion or exclusion is primarily predicated on a laudable and morally constructive cause. Fortunately, while like the two other coordinate arms of democratic governance, the judiciary is generously and democratically open to suggestions and proposals from CSO leaders like Mr. Thompson, nevertheless, neither the judicial establishment nor Chief Justice Anin-Yeboah is the least bit obligated to take any marching orders from any quarter of Ghanaian society. Not even from the Chief Executive of Ghana’s Ship-of-State who appointed CJ Anin-Yeboah to his present post as the most powerful jurist and legal light in the country.

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By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., PhD

English Department, SUNY-Nassau

Garden City, New York

December 30, 2020

E-mail: okoampaahoofe@optimum.net

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