Why Alban Bagbin Is Not Fit to Be Ghana’s Parliamentary Speaker

He spent most of his active professional legal life and career as a staunch member of the nation’s oldest and hitherto sole umbrella organization of licensed and certified practicing lawyers, namely, the Ghana Bar Association (GBA) and does not seem to have found anything significantly or seriously wrong with the conduct of business by the executive operatives of the GBA on behalf of the entirety of its membership, spread across all the 16 administrative regions of the country. On the latter count must also be highlighted the fact that for most of the years that he was a staunch and bona fide member of the GBA, it was the Chairman Jeremiah “Jerry” John Rawlings-led junta of the Provisional National Defense Council (PNDC), of which Mr. Alban Sumana Kingsford Bagbin was a staunch member and supporter that literally ruled the proverbial roost.

And then the Rawlings-led democratically elected government of the National Democratic Congress (NDC), that immediately succeeded the PNDC, also hermetically dominated the country’s political landscape. Throughout all these years, the longest-serving National Democratic Congress’ Member of Parliament from the Nadowli-Kaleo Constituency, in the Upper-West Region, saw absolutely nothing wrong with both the executive composition and operations of the Ghana Bar Association whatsoever. Now, all of a sudden, Mr. Bagbin, who has been Speaker of Ghana’s Parliament for nearly two years now, claims, rather curiously, that the GBA has become too elitist for his taste and comfort. Even more significantly, Speaker Bagbin is reported to be claiming that it just recently came to his attention that the Ghana Bar Association or, rather, the latter organization’s executive operatives, did not recognize “any lawyer who attended the public tribunals.”

The latter, of course, is an obvious reference to the death squads that were established by the Rawlings-led junta of the Provisional national Defense Council, globally infamous for denying the fundamental human rights of hundreds of thousands of, for the most part, innocent and law-abiding Ghanaian citizens deliberately targeted for summary liquidation after show-trial charades, humiliated and indefinitely incarcerated because they were capriciously and prejudicially deemed to be “Enemies of the State and the People” who did not facilely subscribe to the extortionate tenets and the “revolutionary” ideology of the Libya- and Cuba-leaning PNDC. Now, this stance of Speaker Bagbin is very fascinating because it poignantly underscores the fact that our protagonist does not believe in the protection and the preservation of the human and civil rights of the average Ghanaian citizen, the kind of Ghanaian citizen who suffered most of the wanton abuse, various forms of atrocities and murder at the hands of operatives and assigns of the cabinet members of the Mafia-like PNDC dispensers of state-sponsored terror.

But the real question is the following: Why did Speaker Bagbin wait so long to announce to the media that he had decided to immediately withdraw his membership from the Ghana Bar Association to which, by the way, the former Parliamentary Leader and cabinet appointee claims to have stopped paying his membership due for quite a temporally unspecified while now? And then to so unprofessionally make such an announcement in his office, at Parliament House, only when a dubious delegation of some mischief-making National Democratic Congress’ operatives calling themselves the executive members of a so-called Law Society of Ghana (LSG) made a courtesy call on him under the pretext of congratulating the Speaker on the occasion of him having just been elected or appointed President of the Commonwealth Leaders Association? Why, for instance, had Speaker Bagbin not officially written to the executive membership of the Ghana Bar Association, with copies to the media, categorically expressing his decision and the reason(s) for resigning his membership?

Needless to say, the way, manner and the timing of the resignation of his membership from the Ghana Bar Association tells us more about the reprobate character of the man and the political party which he represented in Ghana’s National Assembly for some three decades than anything morally questionable about the leadership of the Ghana Bar Association. At any rate, what we know so far about the newly formed Law Society of Ghana is that it is obviously an amateurish renaming of the flagrantly and shamelessly ideological and politically scandalous Conference of National Democratic Congress Lawyers, which recently held its second or third annual meeting in the Volta regional capital of Ho, keynoted by the twice-defeated former President John “European Airbus Payola” Dramani Mahama, at which event the latter sophomorically lambasted the membership of the country’s judicial establishment for flatly and adamantly refusing to deliver a victory decision or verdict in favor of Mr. Mahama’s 2020 Presidential-Election Petition, because the plaintiff had scandalously failed to provide to provide any forensically credible evidence to back up his “Trumpian” claim that the 2020 Presidential Election had been rigged by the Chairperson of the Independent Electoral Commission (IEC), Mrs. Jean Adukwei Mensa, in favor of an incumbent President Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo.

That the newly formed Law Society of Ghana is presided over by a dyed-in-the-wool National Democratic Congress’ machine operative by the name of Mr. Rockson-Nelson Dafeamekpor, the party’s Member of Parliament for the South-Dayi Constituency, in the Volta Region, readily gives away the lie that the legal wing of the National Democratic Congress could be legitimately reckoned to be a viable and salutary and a more democratic alternative to the Ghana Bar Association.

NOTE: As of this press preparation, another news report had appeared on several Ghanaian media portals quoting Speaker Bagbin to have vehemently denied having resigned his membership of the Ghana Bar Association (GBA).

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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]