Ghana May Be Heading Towards Constitutional Crisis and Massive Civil Strife

One hopes that, as usual the Presidency and the topmost leadership of the John Dramani Mahama-led government of the Anti-Judicial Establishment operatives of the ruling National Democratic Congress (NDC) are not grossly misguidedly copycatting the Right-Wing and Neo-Fascist Agenda-2025 “Devolution” of the United States’ Republican Party-sponsored attempt to reduce democratic political culture and governance to a procrustean “One-Size-Fits-All” regime, a Faux-Socialist agenda that the leadership of the immediate ideological progenitor and institutional antecedent of the National Democratic Congress, namely, the late Chairman Jeremiah “Jerry” John Rawlings-led extortionate erstwhile junta of the Provisional National Defense Council (PNDC), has been studiously, steadily and doggedly pursuing since June 30, 1982.

On that fateful Wednesday night of June 30, 1982, the Rawlings-Tsikata Cabal of the Anlo-Ewe-dominated and piloted PNDC savagely orchestrated the midnight abduction and the unspeakable Mafia-style execution of the Three Akan-Descended Accra High Court Judges, in what has become known and regarded globally as the very first postcolonial attempt by the Anlo-Ewe Trokosi Nationalist Sogakope Mafia and their largely Northern-Descended Allies of the Ghana Armed Forces at the Ethnic Cleansing of the membership of the highest echelons of Ghana’s Judicial Establishment (See The Azu-Crabbe Commission Report; also, The Report of the Justice Samuel Azu-Crabbe-Chaired blue-ribbon Special Investigations Board or The SIB Report).

The Three Accra High Court Judges, namely, Justices Cecilia Koranteng-Addow, Kwadwo Agyei Agyepong and Frederick Poku-Sarkodie were, in fact, Supreme Court Judges, except that the institutional establishment of the Supreme Court had been previously abolished by the Gen. Ignatius Kutu Acheampong-led junta of the National Redemption Council (NRC), subsequently renamed the Supreme Military Council (SMC-I & II). The oldest of the three judges, Justice Poku-Sarkodie, had actually served on the Supreme Court under the First-Republican Government of the President Kwame Nkrumah-led Convention People’s Party (CPP). Today, the statuary busts of the brutally slain judges stand on the forecourt of the architectural edifice of the Supreme Court of Ghana, across the High Street from the Kwame Nkrumah Mausoleum in Ghana’s capital of Accra.

Unfortunately, many of the very young leaders of the present-day National Democratic Congress may either not have been born then or might have been too young to remember this most scandalous, painful and volatile period in Ghana’s postcolonial history which well appears to have been expediently and conveniently concealed from them by the likes of President Mahama and some of the much older members and leaders of the presently ruling National Democratic Congress. These otherwise reasonably intelligent and well-educated young men and women need to be reminded about the fact that for the very first time since the Lt.-Gen. E. K. Kotoka, IGP J. W. K. Harlley and Brig.-Gen. A. A. Afrifa-led February 24, 1966 putsch that morally and politically refreshingly ousted the “democratic” dictatorship of the Convention People’s Party, Ghana came dangerously close to the verge of sliding into a full-scale civil war, the likes of which would have made the so-called June 4th Rawlings Revolution seem like snow flurries in the middle of a New York City summer.

Make absolutely no mistake, its most recent “emphatic” electoral victory and all, Ghana could very well dangerously slide into a geopolitically irreversible civil war of the kind that has gripped several West African countries in recent years, including Liberia, Sierra Leone and our neighboring and kindred Democratic Republic of La Côte d’Ivoire, if the long-predicted attempt by a “Judicially Blood-Thirsty” Mahama Presidency to have Chief Justice Gertrude Araba Esaaba Sackey Torkornoo summarily removed from the Apex Bench is not widely envisaged to have been justifiably and appropriately handled or managed.

Besides, matters are not made any less complicated by the incontrovertible fact that as far as any studious mature adult-Ghanaian observer of our Fourth Republican political landscape could credibly attest, over the course of at least some 20 years now, morally and politically benightedly crude and very public attempts have been made by the leadership of the National Democratic Congress to have Supreme Court Judges appointed by Neoliberal New Patriotic Party Presidents summarily removed by NDC-sponsored Presidents, beginning with the late President John Evans Atta-Mills, the former boss and the immediate predecessor of President John “I Have No Classmates in Ghana” Dramani Mahama.

But for the staunch support of a wide cross-section of the General Ghanaian Public - excluding such Mahama-appointed women cabinet appointees as Nana Oye Lithur, Betty Mould-Iddrisu, Elizabeth Ofosu-Agyare and Marietta Brew Appiah-Oppong, to name only a handful - Chief Justice Georgina Theodora Wood, the very first woman head of Ghana’s Judicial Establishment since Independence and the longest to hold this most prestigious position, would have been summarily removed from office shortly after the constitutionally stipulated terminal departure of President John “The Gentle Giant” Agyekum-Kufuor in January 2009.

The same climate of insufferable hostility had been fomented by a then former President Mahama against Retired Chief Justice Kwasi Anin-Yeboah, in the wake of Candidate Mahama’s decisive loss of the 2020 Presidential and the loss of his Akufo-Addo Copycat Presidential-Election Petition, although the Bole-Bamboi native, from the Akufo-Addo-created Savannah Region, had presented absolutely no forensically credible evidence - as later publicly acknowledged by Mr. Johnson “The Mosquito” Asiedu-Nketia, the former General-Secretary of the National Democratic Congress and, presently, the National Chairman of the National Democratic Congress - to back up Mr. Mahama’s patently farcical claim of a thoroughly rigged 2020 Presidential Election.

An irredeemably defeated Candidate Mahama would literally call for the head of Chief Justice Anin-Yeboah to be delivered to him on a diamond platter. The constant and relentless harassment of the immediate successor to Retired Chief Justice Sophia Akuffo may very well have led to the hurricane-swiftness with which Justice Anin-Yeboah vacated his office. Recently, though, it briefly appeared that a delirium-recovered President Mahama was finally and maturely coming to terms with the imperative need to peacefully coexist with the membership of the Third Coordinate Arm of our democratic political culture, when a publicly self-proclaimed “Born Again” Mr. Mahama appointed Retired Chief Justice Sophia Akuffo to the largely advisory and the J. B. Danquah-inspired Ghana National Council-of-State or Council-of-State, for short, amidst vehement protestations from some stalwarts of the National Democratic Congress.

And then as the old maxim goes, “Our Horse Went Crazy Again!” just as some of us were beginning to heave a deep sigh of relief, finally. Then we heard on the news that a statement had been released on Social Media to the effect that some petitions regarding some alleged and unspecified misconduct on the part of Chief Justice Gertrude Torkornoo, sighted by the target of conspiracy and removal herself, indicated that a rabidly Anti-Judicial President Mahama had already forwarded the aforesaid petitions to Members of Council-of-State, predictably and characteristically unprofessionally, without strictly following established statutory protocol which demanded that the target of intended Apex Court Removal be first availed copies of the alleged petitions prior to the same being officially forwarded to the entire membership of the Council-of-State (See “Chief Justice Gertrude Torkornoo Demands Copies of Petitions Seeking Her Removal” Modernghana.com 3/27/25).

Now, if the preceding account of the grossly unprofessional conduct of President Mahama has validity, then it almost definitely goes without saying that the Council-of-State is obligated to roundly reject the aforesaid petition in toto! It is more than very obvious here that what President Mahama is seeking to achieve here is “Judicial Nullification,” that is, the constitutionally ultra-vires attempt to effectively defang the Judiciary and effectively plunge the country into a state of siege and the kind of “Civil Dictatorship” that precipitated the historic and the salutary overthrow of the Kwame Nkrumah-led regime of the Convention People’s Party. We must all hope to the High Heavens that we are wrong on this count.

By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., PhD
Professor Emeritus, Department of English
SUNY-Nassau Community College
Garden City, New York
March 28, 2025
E-mail: [email protected]