Trust Me, Akufo-Addo Is Not That Naïve

Had the President, Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo, totally ignored the alleged petitioned composed and forwarded to him by epically failed Independent Special Prosecutor Martin ABK Amidu, seeking the summary removal of his immediate successor, namely, Mr. William Kissi Agyebeng, for issues having to do with breach of procurement protocol and the short-shrift treatment of members of the Judicial Establishment, the same Mr. Manasseh Azure Awuni, the investigative journalist turned vehement critic and an inveterate detractor of Nana Akufo-Addo, would be writing, publishing and broadcasting torrents of tirades and dissertations about the former Attorney-General and Minister of Justice in the government of President John “The Gentle Giant” Agyekum-Kufuor’s being an adamantly autocratic scofflaw who prefers to deal with serious questions of justice selectively.

Now, we have the same Mr. Awuni, the self-described “Bongo Boy,” from the Upper-East Region, virulently and caustically accusing his political archnemesis of preparing to have a professionally unimpeachable Mr. Kissi Agyebeng summarily and gratuitously removed from office (See “Akufo-Addo about to remove Special Prosecutor Kissi Agyebeng just like Charlotte Osei — Manasseh Azure” Modernghana.com 5/17/24). There are absolutely no striking similarities here, by the way, short of the fact of the President’s being alleged to have forwarded Mr. Amidu’s removal petition to Chief Justice Gertrude Torkonoo for study, investigation and consideration. The final judgment, of course, rests with the President and will likely be fully and squarely predicated on the evaluative conclusions reached by the Chief Justice and her representatives and assigns in the coming days and weeks or even months.

Still, there can be absolutely no gainsaying that the circumstances under which Mrs. Charlotte Kesson-Smith Osei was appointed to the high-wire job of Chairperson of the Independent Electoral Commission (IEC), is almost completely at variance with the set of circumstances under which Mr. Kissi Agyebeng, a hitherto very successful private legal practitioner, was appointed to this equally most sensitive portfolio. For starters, at the time of her appointment to the job of Chairperson of the Electoral Commission, Mrs. Osei was Chairperson of the National Commission for Civic Education (NCCE), a lateral institutional establishment with the same statutory status as that of the Chairperson of the IEC or EC.

And at the time under present discussion, even as the renowned constitutional law expert Professor Kofi Abotsi noted, the transfer of the NCCE’s Chairperson to the EC by then-President John Dramani Mahama was constitutionally ultra vires or out-of-order since, in principle, Mrs. Osei was not being vertically promoted from a lower administrative rung or level to a higher one. You see, as Professor Abotsi painstakingly explained at the time in media interviews and essays and articles, Ghana’s 1992 Republican Constitution clearly states that in order to ensure noninterference in the work of the Heads of the Seven, or so, Commissions statutorily entrenched by the latter statutory apparatus or governance instrument, short of retirement, death, physical or mental incapacity or resignation or removal for legally or judicially appropriate and/or justifiable reasons, the President shall not cause any of these Commission Heads to be arbitrarily transferred from one Commission to another, including the Commission for Human Rights and Administrative Justice (CHRAJ).

Not surprisingly, that was precisely what a politically motivated President Mahama did when, in the wake of the inglorious retirement of Dr. Kwadwo Afari-Gyan, in late 2014 or early 2015, the former Rawlings-appointed Communications Minister literally shoehorned Mrs. Osei from her statutorily entrenched or permanent portfolio as Chairperson of the National Commission for Civic Education to the more politically sensitive and powerful Independent Electoral Commission. In the case of Mr. Kissi Agyebeng, however, no apparent conflict of interest exists here; unless, of course, one envisages the executive and the national and, to be certain, global contretemps that is the morally and the legally highly charged Cecilia Abena Dapaah Money Laundering Affair, at least that is what we have now been widely informed by the media is the reason for the decision by a hard-driving Mr. Kissi Agyebeng to hand over the latter case involving the former Sanitation Minister to the Economic and Organized Crimes Office (EOCO) for further investigation and prosecution.

While it has, indeed, been clear from the inception of Nana Akufo-Addo’s appointment of Mr. Kissi Agyebeng to the post of Independent Special Prosecutor, that an epically failed Mr. Amidu, turned an overnight “Konongo Kaya,” was not apt to decently look on as a has-been outsider while a razor-sharp efficient and far more intellectually acute and erudite and better qualified Mr. Agyebeng fluently conducted his business inimitably in ways that Martin Amidu could only envy with ravenous mouth-licking, the same cannot be said of Nana Akufo-Addo whose timely appointment of Mr. Kissi Agyebeng as a replacement for Mr. Amidu has, once again, amply proven beyond any iota or shadow of doubt that the twice-elected substantive President of our beloved Sovereign Democratic Republic of Ghana is precisely what the proverbial doctor ordered as remedy for rank official corruption in the country.

As Chairperson of the IEC, it was her brazen and willful decision to play interference for the ballot-rigging leadership of the National Democratic Congress, in particular her imprudent defiance of election-related decisions handed down by the Wood Supreme Court, that put Mrs. Osei on an inevitable and a self-destructive collision course with the newly elected Akufo-Addo Administration. There is absolutely no concrete evidence of any such problem in the case of Mr. Kissi Agyebeng. At any rate, if the leadership of the ruling New Patriotic Party, including Attorney-General Godfred Yeboah-Dame, wanted to remove a professionally clean rake like Mr. Kissi Agyebeng from office, trust me, the first human agent or vector for the execution of such a hatchet job would not be Martin ABK Amidu.

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By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., PhD
Professor Emeritus, Department of English
SUNY-Nassau Community College
Garden City, New York
E-mail: [email protected]