On Chief Justice Removal: Focus on Torkornoo’s Caliber, Not the Motive(s) of Her Detractors

The problem that Yours Truly is having reading and listening to New Patriotic Party (NPP) stalwarts jousting with President John “European Airbus SE Payola” Dramani Mahama, in a bid to preventing Chief Justice Gertrude Araba Esaaba Sackey-Torkornoo from being dismissed from office, is the morbidly bitter focus by the Chief Justice’s staunchest and fiercest defenders on the President’s apparent motive for seeking to have the Wesley Girls’ High School alumna summarily ousted from the job which she has, so far, been competently performing, instead of intensely and squarely focusing on the professional caliber and the competence of unarguably one of the most intellectually puissant legal lights ever to have been appointed as Head or President of the Highest Court of the Land (See “Mahama’s Attempt to Remove CJ Torkornoo Political Victimization - Kwasi Kawrteng” Modernghana.com 4/19/25).

You see, what is clearly and inescapably at stake here regards the critical question of whether or not Chief Justice Sackey-Torkornoo has conducted herself and/or her office in either a morally or professionally flagrant or egregious manner as to warrant her prompt and immediate removal from the Apex Court. This is the crux of the widely anticipated saga, not the fact of whether the former Arch-Lieutenant to the late President John Evans “Atta-Woyome” Mills has any personal agenda or vendetta against the first-rate graduate of the University of Ghana, Legon, and the Golden State, California, University Law Schools, respectively.

Of course, as already noted in several of the previous columns by Yours Truly on this subject, President Mahama has relentlessly been waging an Anti-Judicial Establishment Battle for approximately 20 years now, beginning with the hitherto historically unprecedented appointment of Chief Justice Emeritus Georgina Theodora Wood by former President John “The Gentle Giant” Agyekum-Kufuor, the very first native-born woman citizen to have been named to the highly coveted post of Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of Ghana.

You see, the problem that the twice, nonconsecutively elected Bole-Bamboi native, from the Akufo-Addo-created Savannah Region, has with Supreme Court Judges appointed by Presidents of the New Patriotic Party (NPP), appears to be more ideologically and politically motivated than the mere fact of whether the appointees are or were academically and professionally qualified to be legitimately seated on the Highest Bench of the Land.

To be certain, even a casual and a tangential examination of the profiles and the calibers of legal practitioners recommended for seating on the Apex Court would clearly indicate that, by and large, appointees seated or nominated to sit on the highest and the most politically powerful bench of the land by New Patriotic Party-sponsored Fourth-Republican Presidents have been relatively far and away more erudite and professionally unimpeachable than those nominated or appointed for sitting on the Supreme Court by National Democratic Congress-sponsored Presidents. But, of course, the latter observation is prime grist for a completely different subject-matter altogether and one that conspicuously falls well outside the discursive purview of the present column.

At any rate, as a robust, even if a still fragile and fledgling, postcolonial democratic political culture and an open society, Ghanaians ought to have by now been made aware of the details of the contents of the three alleged petitions seeking the summary dismissal or the removal of Chief Justice Sackey-Torkornoo, and not be unduly made to await the outcome of the recommendations allegedly made by the Ghana National Council-of-State, a primarily advisory and a statutorily nonbinding institutional establishment and a decidedly adjunct appendage of the Executive Branch of our Three-Pronged Democratic Government, before any significant or momentous and morally and intellectually robust national debate or conversation could be initiated on the same, by which time any attempt to get the finality of the President’s decision on the fate of the Chief Justice would be effectively and decidedly Dead-On-Arrival.

Which is also why it may be imperative for the Professor Henry Kwasi Prempeh-chaired Constitution Review Committee to recommend making the details of any grievances for which the Chief Justice could be summarily relieved of her/his portfolio by the Chief Executive of State or the President public well in advance of any such politically epochal decision being made. Any temporally predictable attempt to remove or summarily dismiss the Chief Justice, as appears to be presently under way and in high dudgeon, may be aptly deemed to be seismic and epochal in the kind of the functionally bastardized conflation of the Executive and the Legislative branches of our Fourth Republican democratic dispensation as it presently exists.

It is only the Supreme Court or the Judiciary that presently critically serves as the most credible institutional protector and mediator between “Constitutional Dictatorship” and the largely politically vulnerable overwhelming majority of the Ghanaian citizenry. It is eerily clear that what the principals and/or the key operatives of the Mahama 2.0 Presidency are desperately scheming for is to be literally gifted with a Judicial Rubber Stamp of the kind and the sort that existed under the tenure of the Kwame Nkrumah-led Convention People’s Party (CPP) in Ghana’s immediate postcolonial era, so as to enable a government that has already proven itself in the recent past to be arguably the most corrupt of its kind in Ghana’s Fourth Republic, at least by the morally and the politically authoritative lights of the late former President Jeremiah “Jerry” John Rawlings, the universally acclaimed Founding-Father of the National Democratic Congress, to literally have an open season for the promotion and the perpetration of rank and wanton corruption.

Which was fundamentally what the Anti-Judicial Collaborative Season of Massacre, launched by the erstwhile Mahama 1.0 regime and the Anas Aremeyaw Anas-owned and operated Tiger-Eye Private Investigations Company Limited, was incontrovertibly about. Under the present circumstances, the imperative need for a Constitutional Amendment to ensure the maintenance of an Independent Judicial System and Establishment, such as presently prevails in the United States of America, cannot be gainsaid. This, in essence, is what the raging battle to have Chief Justice Gertrude Araba Esaaba Sackey-Torkornoo ousted from office is squarely and inescapably about. It is the entire fate and the destiny of Fourth-Republican Ghana that is indubitably at stake here, not necessarily the fate of the career of one of the finest jurists and legal luminaries of our time and generation that is at stake here.

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