Stop this Kind of Inferiority-Complex Thinking, Mr. Attorney-General

Attorney-General Godfred Yeboah Dame is widely reported to have bitterly lamented that the Ministry of Justice, where he is the boss, has been operating in decrepit physical-plant facilities and architectural infrastructure that leaves much to be desired all over the country, and that it was far past time for the remarkable number of Ivy-League educated lawyers and attorneys who work in his office and the Ministry of Justice to be provisioned with state-of-the-art physical-plant facilities and technological equipment (See “It's unacceptable for our Ivy League State Attorneys to be operating from shipping containers - Godfred Dame” Modernghana.com 6/11/24).

There is another equally significant, if not unignorably critical, edge or angle to the foregoing plaint or lament. And it is the fact of the apparent failure of the Attorney-General to have first asked himself whether, indeed, those Ivy-League educated lawyers and state attorneys whose apparently deplorable physical working conditions he is so worried about have, by and large, been producing Ivy-Quality lawyering for the country’s judicial system. There is a globally common maxim, perhaps even Biblically or scripturally oriented, which says that: “You reap exactly what you sow,” or even more linguistically poignantly: “You cannot reap that which you have not sown.”

The impact of the so-called Ivy-League imprimatur is not a completely novel phenomenon in the history of Modern Ghana, beginning with the partially University of Pennsylvania Graduate School-educated President Kwame Nkrumah. And on the latter count also needs to be promptly observed, emphatically, that the greatest and the most seminal influences that critically shaped Ghana’s first postcolonial leader into the heroic leader that he became, from such influential thinkers as C L R James and George Padmore, as well as Marcus Mosiah Garvey, by his own documented confession, had not come from any Ivy-Festooned Citadel or Tower but from the socioeconomically immiserated or impoverished seedy streets of Black Harlem, New York City, in the 1930s and the 1940s.

At any rate, before we proceed any further, we need to relevantly and significantly contextualize the fact that Attorney-General Yeboah Dame is reported by the state-run and operated and Kwame Nkrumah-founded Ghana News Agency (GNA), while commissioning a 12-story edifice named The Law House, which is set or scheduled to serve as the Office of the Attorney-General and the Ministry of Justice in our nation’s capital of Accra, as having made the foregoing observations. But Mr. Yeboah Dame also made a critically worthwhile observation that equally needs to be taken into consideration, which is that the era or period when all the most modern architectural and technological facilities in government were almost exclusively centered on or centralized in Accra needs to be promptly consigned to the past, which Yours Truly readily interpreted to mean that the rapid decentralization of both how governance is done and justice delivered in the country must be firmly foregrounded as one of the foremost national-development agenda(s) of the widely presumed incoming Bawumia Administration.

Equally instructive here is the observation made by Attorney-General Yeboah Dame that the recently commissioned Law House was actually commenced as relatively far back as some 24 years ago, which would put it back to the Year 2000, just about the time of the first term of the two-term John “The Gentle Giant” Agyekum-Kufuor-led government of the New Patriotic Party (NPP). Which simply means that in the virtually static interregnum that was the tandem John Evans Atta-Mills- and the John “I Have No Classmates In Ghana” Dramani Mahama-led regimes of the National Democratic Congress, other than the rampant and riotous harassment and the individual and the institutional humiliation of the Chief Justice Georgina Theodora Wood-led Judicial Establishment, especially by President Mahama and the hired goons of the Anas Aremeyaw Anas-owned and operated Tiger-Eye Private Investigators Gang of Judicial Terrorists, absolutely nothing worthwhile had been done to significantly improve both the working conditions and the general quality of the delivery of salutary jurisprudence in the country.

If today, the general quality of the delivery of justice in Ghana leaves much to be desired, Attorney-General Yeboah Dame clearly seems to imply, this is largely because the key operatives of the Mahama-led National Democratic Congress have effectively been at war with the country’s entire judicial establishment. Nevertheless. We need to also quickly underscore the fact that perhaps because of his unimpeachable appreciation of the legal and the judicial establishment of the country, being also a quite remarkable legal light himself, the late President Atta-Mills contributed relatively far more significantly and positively towards the delivery of justice in the country than could be aptly said of his immediate successor, who clearly envisaged the country’s judicial establishment as the one mortal enemy that literally needed to be razed to ashes or to be witheringly and effectively vitiated, if not thoroughly liquidated, in order to guarantee a free-for-all, open season of rank official corruption.

President Atta-Mills would be credited with having released funding for the new court building in Accra that bears his name and was commissioned by retired Chief Justice Georgina T. Wood. Scarcely any such contribution to the development of Ghanaian jurisprudence and our judicial establishment could be truthfully and objectively be attributed to the present Serial and the Dynastic Presidential Candidate of the National Democratic Congress. It is also crystal clear that populist talk and all, it is the leadership of the New Patriotic Party, ironically, who can be fittingly and more aptly be described as the direct heirs of the seminal Kwame Nkrumah-led Convention People’s Party (CPP), and not the State-Capture apparatchiks of the faux-socialist National Democratic Congress.

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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]