Why Is Sam Jonah Peeved by Akufo-Addo’s Phenomenal Success? – Part 1

Sam Jonah

I just finished reading a news report of the address that Mr. Sam Jonah, the controversial mining magnate, gave to some Rotary Club members in our nation’s capital of Accra, titled “Sam Jonah Decries Culture of Silence Under Akufo-Addo’s Presidency” (Modernghana.com 4/23/21) and find it to be very fascinating for both its commissions or plaints and its omissions or deliberate failure to highlight what President Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo has done, or may be doing right that has “positively” induced the sort of bizarre or weird “Culture of Silence” that the former Managing-Director (MD) of the Asante (Ashanti) Goldfields Corporation (AGC) claims has fast crept onto our national political arena.

And just precisely what does the Cape Coast-born Adisadel College alumnus suppose Ghanaians ought to be faulting the Akufo-Addo-led Administration of the New Patriotic Party (NPP) for not doing right or not doing at all? Well, for starters, in his address titled “Down the Up Escalator: Reflections of a Senior Citizen,” the “Well-Pedigreed Ghanaian citizen,” in the words of former President John Agyekum-Kufuor, claims that our country’s entire judicial system is swamped by functional lethargy and woefully lacks the confidence and trust of the Ghanaian citizenry. I wrote my responses and counter-reflections on my reading of the afore-referenced news analysis of his Rotary Club presentation and hereby present a few in the present column, with the hope of presenting the rest in subsequent columns on the same subject.

On the question of acute judicial lethargy and patent and scandalous dysfunction, maybe somebody needs to tell the rather self-righteous critic that his speech is at least five-odd years late in coming and ought to have been given when former President John “Akonfem-SADA” Dramani Mahama rode roughshod over the Georgina Theodora Wood-presided Supreme Court of Ghana’s conviction and sentencing of the infamous Mahama propaganda shills who became known as the Montie Three or the Montie Trio. The latter had publicly and intemperately threatened to sexually violate the person of Chief Justice Wood, if the latter and her associates on the highest court of the land did not accede to demands being made by the leadership of the then-ruling National Democratic Congress (NDC) to be allowed to blatantly rig our electoral process in the leadup to the 2016 General Election.

Well, as had been widely expected, not only did the membership of the Supreme Court of Ghana (SCOG) roundly reject such criminal and barbarous threats and demands, it also ensured that these treasonous thugs were promptly placed behind bars to serve as a teachable lesson and a deterrent to other paid NDC thugs and shills who reasoned along such morally and legally untenable lines. The Montie Trio would be sentenced to four months imprisonment to be served at the world-famous Kwame Nkrumah College for Proper Political Reeducation, also known as the Nsawam Medium-Security Prison, only to be sprung out of the slammer by a judicially disdainful and scofflaw President John Dramani Mahama, with the staunch backing of his full panoply of female cabinet appointees, obviously in a propagandistic bid to neutralize the institutional impact and significance of Chief Justice Wood, a fellow woman whom they clearly perceived to be irreligiously obstructive of the steely determination of the Mahama Posse to hermetically and indefinitely hang on to power.

Among the star cast of the Mahama female cabinet appointees who attempted to deprecate and nullify the judicial and institutional legitimacy of Chief Justice Wood and her SCOG associates were Nana Oye Lithur, the renowned women’s rights activist and Children, Gender and Social Minister; Mrs. Betty Mould-Iddrisu, the former Atta-Mills’ Attorney-General and Minister of Justice; and Mrs. Marietta Brew Appiah-Oppong, the Mahama-appointed Attorney-General and Minister of Justice. As well and bringing up the rear was Mrs. Elizabeth Ofosu-Agyare, the Mahama-appointed Minister for Tourism, Culture and the Creative Arts. Under the tenure of President Akufo-Addo, it cannot be gainsaid that the judiciary has significantly regained some of its institutional integrity, trust and respectability, although a lot more clearly needs to be done in order to fully restore the institutional establishment of the judiciary to where it optimally needs to be in any functionally robust, progressive and socially responsive and responsible civilized constitutional democracy.

The preceding is clearly what Mr. Jonah ought to have dispassionately discussed in his Rotary Club presentation, that is, the history and question of precisely how our judicial system became the wishy-washy institutional establishment that it is today. You see, lopsidedly focusing on the effects and symptoms of the nation’s judicial system and apparatus was shamefully unscholarly, unthoughtful and a rather cheap and morally objectionable method or approach to seriously tackling what is really the trouble and problem with our seemingly comatose judicial system and establishment. But, of course, such critical superficiality as the tack or angle taken by Mr. Sam Jonah is perfectly and stereotypically Ghanaian and standard fare in the general thinking and traditional mindset of our Senior Citizenry. Anything and everything goes, except, of course, the real thing or the real issue at stake.

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By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., PhD

English Department, SUNY-Nassau

Garden City, New York

April 29, 20221

E-mail: [email protected]