Conference of NDC Lawyers Renamed Law Society of Ghana

The Acting President of the recently formed or founded Law Society of Ghana (LSG) is Mr. Rockson-Nelson Dafeamekpor, the country’s main opposition political party’s Member of Parliament for South-Dayi Constituency, in the Volta Region. So, it is inescapably obvious that it is the same former President John “European Airbus Payola” Dramani Mahama-sponsored Conference of National Democratic Congress’ Lawyers that has strategically, albeit downright amateurishly, morphed into the so-called Law Society of Ghana (LSG). It is almost a sure bet that not a single sympathizer or supporter of the ruling New Patriotic Party (NPP) is a member of this NDC- and Mahama-sponsored shambolic society of lawyers, whose leadership has also decided to recruit law students onto its rollcall of members (See “Alban Bagbin Quits Ghana Bar Association” MyxyzOnline.com /Ghanaweb.com 9/24/22).

If the preceding observations about the so-called Law Society of Ghana has validity, then it cannot be gainsaid that it is highly unlikely for the Dafeamekpor-led Law Society of Ghana to pose any serious or formidable challenge to the nation’s oldest and most respected and recognized association of qualified and professionally certified legal practitioners, namely, the Ghana Bar Association (GBA). It cannot pose any formidable challenge to the GBA because by the very nature of its leadership, the Law Society of Ghana is decidedly the legal wing or department of the National Democratic Congress. But perhaps what is even more significant to highlight here is the inescapable fact that the formation of the LSG comes on the heels of the intemperate and virulent call by the former President at the most recent national confabulation by the Conference of National Democratic Congress’ Lawyers, in the Volta regional capital of Ho, for the immediate removal of Chief Justice Kwasi Anin-Yeboah, on the patently vacuous and untenable grounds that the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of Ghana (SCOG) had not strategically twisted the arms of Lady Justice, as had been ethnocentrically done by Justice William Atuguba, Mr. Mahama’s fellow northern-descended jurist, in the 2012 Presidential-Election Petition that had been filed by the now-President Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo and the now-Vice-President Mahamudu Bawumia, and the late Mr. Jake Otanka Obetsebi-Lamptey, at the time the National Chairman of the then main opposition New Patriotic Party.

In the Atuguba-presided Presidential-Election Petition, the verdict was 5-to-4 in favor of the respondent, to wit, the then-incumbent President Mahama. But it was incontrovertibly obvious that the metaphorical deck of playing cards had been deliberately and unethically stacked against Nana Akufo-Addo, not the least because the judication of the 2012 Presidential-Election Petition had lasted an unprecedented 8 months, a record of gross judicial incompetence unrivaled anywhere in the civilized democratic world. In Kenya, a similar case of electoral litigation had been effectively and definitively resolved, even if widely deemed not to be satisfactory to both parties to the case, in just four weeks. Likewise, what was equally remarkable for its patent oddity and weirdness was the fact that the extant Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of Ghana, Mrs. Georgina Theodora Wood, was known to have trained and mentored a considerable number of the jurists who sat on the Presidential-Election Petition Trial in Kenya.

Ghanaians would later learn from a Nigerian scholar and a Ford Foundation Fellow, that the verdict in the Atuguba-presided Akufo-Addo-led Presidential-Election Petition may have been unduly delayed because the verdicts of several jurists kept being criminally tinkered with by some covertly instructed judicial clerks with the tacit complicity of some Mahama-leaning jurists. So, it is quite obvious that when the Mahama Posse bitterly complains about the present bench of the Supreme Court of Ghana having been deliberately packed with New Patriotic Party-leaning judges, it is crystal clear that what the Mahama Posse really means is that the Anin-Yeboah Court is not facilely pro-National Democratic Congress or does not take any marching orders from any recognizable political circles or quarters in the country.

You see, Dear Reader, what is most worrisome here is that in his 2020 Akufo-Addo copycat Presidential-Election Petition, the lead plaintiff, that is, the twice seismically defeated Presidential Candidate of the National Democratic Congress, unlike the now-Vice-President Bawumia, had not presented a single shred of any forensically credible evidence to shore up his case. And yet, Mr. Mahama has been insistent that at least half of the 9 sitting Associate Justices who adjudicated the 2020 Presidential-Election Petition were, somehow, duty bound to have voted in favor of the plaintiff who, as already noted above, had come to court with absolutely no case or evidence and literally wasted the precious time and the cranial resources of these supreme jurists and, with the latter patent case of misdemeanor, a humongous amount of the Ghanaian taxpayer’s money. This, in essence, is the fundamental basis on which the so-called Law Society of Ghana is being established. How bogus!

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By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., PhD

English Department, SUNY-Nassau

Garden City, New York

September 25, 2022

E-mail: [email protected]