Domelevo Was Addressing Ablakwa and Mahama, Not Akufo-Addo

He may have so soon forgotten the fact, generally speaking, the leaders of the presently ruling New Patriotic Party (NPP) have far greater respect for both the rule of law and the judicial establishment, in particular, the Supreme Court of Ghana, in ways that absolutely cannot be said about their counterparts of the country’s main opposition National Democratic Congress (NDC). After all, were we not, all of us, in this country when the then President John Evans Atta-Mills, late, delegated two of his junior cabinet appointees, namely, Messrs. Samuel Okudzeto-Ablakwa and Edward Kofi Omane-Boamah, to criminally and feloniously defy the Chief Justice Georgina Theodora Wood-presided Supreme Court’s decision in the Matter of Jake Otanka Obetsebi-Lamptey v. Okudzeto-Ablakwa & Omane-Boamah?

In that instance, I do not remember Mr. Daniel Yaw Domelevo, the forcibly Akufo-Addo-retired extant Auditor-General, making any such statement regarding the imperative need for the most powerful elected official of the land to respect both the rule of law and the civil and human rights of citizens and residents of much lower socioeconomic and political status. And yet, Mr. Domelevo has the temerity and the hypocritical shamelessness to rebuke Nana Akufo-Addo and revile the latter by taunting him with a dare to write a letter or a memo to the Supreme Court of Ghana impugning the logical and epistemological integrity and credibility of the Apex Court in regard to the Court’s recent declaration of the forced retirement of Auditor-General Domelevo as being patently unconstitutional (See “Write to [the] Supreme Court and Tell Them They Don’t Know the Law – Domelevo Chides Presidency” MyNewsGh.com / Ghanaweb.com 6/1/23).

We also had then President John “Gnassingbe” Dramani Mahama siccing the infamous Montie Trio Agitprop Goon Squad on Chief Justice Wood and even threaten Ghana’s first female Chief Justice with criminal sexual violation, as well as the decapitation of jurists on the proverbial Supreme Bench who were either appointed to the august Supreme Court by New Patriotic Party leaders or were not known to hew to the “revolutionary” tune and the kleptocratic ideology of the National Democratic Congress. Here again, we have absolutely no evidence on the record books indicating that, indeed, the now self-righteous Mr. Yaw Domelevo had called out this treasonous attempt to savagely upend the rule of law and the inalienable human rights of those who had spent years specializing in the civilized preservation and the protective application of the rule of law in the Sovereign Democratic Republic of Ghana.

And then most recently, we had a politically frustrated, desperate and pathologically megalomaniacal Candidate-General John “Gnassingbe” Dramani Mahama mordantly light into retiring Chief Justice Kwasi Anin-Yeboah for flatly refusing to be intimidated and cowed into submission by not scandalously and mendaciously delivering the landmark judgment in the Matter of the 2020 Presidential-Election Petition in favor of the “blood-talking” and blustering Bole-Bamboi and West-Gonja native, from the Akufo-Addo-created Savannah Region. Not surprisingly, it would shortly turn out, via the sobering testimony of a morally chastened and, some would even allege, the remorseful testimony of Mr. Johnson Asiedu-Nketia, Star Witness of the Mahama-led 2020 Presidential-Election Petition and, presently, National Chairman of the National Democratic Congress, that the twice-trounced, one- term former President had cynically gone to court with absolutely no forensically substantive evidence, facilely and cavalierly supposing that he could use sheer bluster to strong-arm the Apex Court’s jurists into delivering their decision in his favor.

Now, My Dear Brother Yaw Domelevo, you just compare the preceding inexcusably infantile Mahama tantrum and potentially seditious patent act of heinous criminality with the very civil and cognitively and politically constructive protest response issued by then Candidate Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo, in the wake of the 2012 Presidential-Election Petition and tell us which of these two Ghanaian leaders demonstrates an emulative caliber of statesmanship. We also need to highlight the fact that the flagrant professional “misconduct” which is widely believed to have precipitated the forcible retirement of then Auditor-General Domelevo, had to do with a purported underpayment of a tax obligation due from a private project-auditing company called Kroll and Associates, which had been legitimately contracted by Mr. Yaw Osafo-Maafo, the extant Presidential Senior Minister, for which Mr. Osafo-Maafo was eventually vindicated by an Accra High Court.

At the above-referenced time in question, this writer vividly recalls composing a news feature column in which he critically remarked about the fact that Auditor-General Domelevo was fast losing his initially admirable and even heroic grips on the job as the kind of no-nonsense State Fiscal Watchdog that Ghana had been in dire need for a very long time, to a disappointingly combative and propagandistic surrogate for an obviously frustrated and a crushingly defeated former President Mahama.

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By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., PhD
English Department, SUNY-Nassau
Garden City, New York
June 1, 2023
E-mail: [email protected]