What Is Your Point Here, Nyebro Senyo?

I am reading Senyo Hosi’s so-called “Senyo Hosi pens an open letter to her Ladyship Gertrude Torkornoo to undo the WeKTO, save our democracy” (Modernghana.com 10/30/24) some Twenty-Four Hours after its publication and, predictably, find it to strikingly exemplify the sort of abject disrespect that has constituted the political dietary fare of the leadership remnants of the late Chairman Jeremiah “Jerry” John Rawlings-led self-righteous and extortionate junta of the erstwhile Provisional National Defense Council (PNDC), whose core of cabinet operatives savagely and criminally executed the Three Akan-Descended Accra High Court Judges and the then recently retired Senior Officer of the Ghana Armed Forces who, at the time, had been the Personnel Manager of the National Democratic Congress-cannibalized and thoroughly dismantled and completely destroyed Kwame Nkrumah-established Ghana Industrial Holdings Corporation (GIHOC), Major Samuel “Sam” Acquah, who, I would shortly learn down the pike, as it were, had been the benevolent uncle of Brig-Gen (Ret) Joseph Nunoo-Mensah.

The Judges were barbarically slain, Mafia-style, as chillingly described by the Justice Samuel Azu-Crabbe Commission-produced Report of the blue-ribbon Special Investigations Board (SIB), that enquired into the Rawlings-Tsikata-masterminded acts of unspeakable savagery, and had their corpses deliberately conflagrated and partially charred. The prime targets of the PNDC-orchestrated assassinations, of course, were Justices Cecilia Koranteng-Addow, the lactating mother of a three-month-old baby daughter, I believe, whose husband had been Attorney-General and Minister of Justice under the previous I. K. Acheampong junta; and Kwadwo Agyei Agyepong and Frederick Poku-Sarkodie, the latter of whom had actually sat on the Bench of the Supreme Court of Ghana under the First-Republican Government of President Kwame Nkrumah in the 1960s. Today, the busts or statuettes of these brutally slain Accra High Court Judges sit in the Forecourt of the modest but, nonetheless, majestic edifice of the Supreme Court of Ghana. They would all have been bona fide Members of the Supreme Court of Ghana, had the latter establishment at the time not been summarily proscribed by the previous Gen. Ignatius (Kwasi) Kutu Acheampong-led junta of the Supreme Military Council (SMC-1).

Now, it is not clear to Yours Truly why Mr. Senyo Hosi who, until very recently, was an executive operative of the twice, consecutively elected presently lame-duck Akufo-Addo Administration so smugly and cavalierly supposes that he could instruct Chief Justice Gertrude Torkornoo on how to preside over the affairs of the very institutional establishment for which she has been specially trained and legislatively vetted and about which the “Open-Letter Writer” so brazenly and abrasively displays the most insufferable level of crass arrogance. Which, of course, is not the least bit surprising, when one also factors into the equation the fact that Mr. Hosi, who is clearly much younger than this author, may very well have spent a considerable amount of his life and existence under the kind of rancid and gruesome culture of rank abuse and the wanton and abject disrespect for such major governance institutional establishments of the country as the august Supreme Court of Ghana, the judicial establishment of last resort, when it comes to the authoritative interpretation of Our National Articles of Faith, to wit, the 1992 Fourth-Republican Constitution of the Sovereign Democratic Republic of Ghana.

But, of course, such unspeakably abject disdain for the Apex Court could not all be the fault of Mr. Senyo Hosi, when even the much older and the more politically seasoned, at least in theory, likes of Speaker Alban Sumana Kingsford Bagbin have firmly established a Tradition of Routine Disrespect for both the Membership and the very institutional establishment of the Supreme Court of Ghana, as Ghanaians sadly witnessed between the late President John Evans Atta-Mills-led government of the National Democratic Congress and Chief Justice Emeritus Georgina Theodora Wood, Ghana’s longest-serving Chief Justice in the postcolonial era, with vigorous and relentless attempts being systematically deployed to force Chief Justice Wood to prematurely resign from the portfolio at which she had proven herself to be among the very best to have occupied.

In the end, the Mahama and the Johnson “The Mosquito” Asiedu-Nketia Posse and the Chaperons of the then ruling National Democratic Congress would curiously succeed in literally stampeding Chief Justice Wood vis-a-vis the then Candidate Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo-led 2012 Presidential-Election Petition by gratuitously recusing herself as President of the Supreme Court of Ghana. A seismically and a convincingly defeated former President John “I Have No Classmates in Ghana” Dramani Mahama would similarly and dastardly attempt to stampede Chief Justice - presently Emeritus - Kwasi Anin-Yeboah, the immediate predecessor of Chief Justice Gertrude Torkornoo, off the Supreme Bench, but to absolutely no avail.

A royally defeated Candidate Mahama would even call for the forcible removal, perhaps even the “Palace Assassination” of Chief Justice Anin-Yeboah, because the latter had meticulously presided over a judicatory panel that had flatly refused to cowardly and literally throw caution and fairness to the wind by deciding the 2020 Mahama Presidential-Election in favor of the latter plaintiff, who had presented absolutely no forensically credible evidence to back up his bogus claim that the country’s present Chairperson of the Independent Electoral Commission (IEC), Mrs. Jean Adukwei Mensa, had criminally and deliberately rigged up the 2020 Presidential Election to favor an Incumbent President Akufo-Addo.

The wicked irony here, though, is that in the wake of the 2012 Presidential Election, well in advance of the decision by Messrs. Akufo-Addo, Mahamudu Bawumia and Jake Otanka Obetsebi-Lamptey, late, Mr. Johnson Asiedu-Nketia, at the time General-Secretary of the then ruling National Democratic Congress, had almost immediately taken to the airwaves to sheepishly contradict the results of that year’s Presidential Election which had an Incumbent Interim-President Mahama being declared the winner by Dr. Kwadwo Afari-Gyan, Ghana’s “longest-playing” Chairperson of the “Pre-Independent” Electoral Commission.

Mr. Asiedu-Nketia, who is presently the National Chairman of the present main opposition National Democratic Congress, would announce to a visibly stunned nation and the rest of the Global Ghanaian Community that, in fact, the results of the 2012 Presidential Election had been deliberately and scandalously called in favor of an Incumbent President Mahama, because the Akufo-Addo polling monitors, observers and assigns had not been vigilant enough.

For his part, Critic Senyo Hosi would have Ghanaians and the Members of the Global Community believe that the mere fact of Ghana’s Constituent Assembly that produced the present Fourth-Republican Constitution having engaged or solicited and included the active participation of “hairdressers, farmers, carpenters and businessmen” such as Mr. Senyo Hosi himself, automatically implies that Ghana’s Fourth-Republican Constitution is open to an equally valid interpretation by just about every and any Ghanaian citizen, and not just either professionally trained lawyers like the specially nominated and legislatively vetted Members of the Supreme Court. How scandalously and myopically absurd.

*Visit my blog at: KwameOkoampaAhoofeJr

By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., PhD
Professor Emeritus, Department of English
SUNY-Nassau Community College
Garden City, New York
October 31, 2024
E-mail: [email protected]