AFAG to sue CHRAJ

Emile Short, Commissioner of CHRAJ

The Alliance for Accountable Governance (AFAG) has accepted the advice of the Commission of Human Rights and Administrative Justice (CHRAJ) in good faith but on the contrary it is heading towards the High Court to sue CHRAJ.

According to lawyer Godfred Dame, a leading member of the pressure group, the advice was an erroneous one.

“There is no constitutional issue for AFAG to go and seek interpretation from the Supreme Court”, he said.

He said they are going to court for an order compelling CHRAJ to perform its constitutional mandate as stated in Article 1 (8) and to also quash CHRAJ's earlier ruling on Ghana's embattled Foreign Minister.

“We filed a petition to CHRAJ to investigate the issues raised against him by the Auditor General and we were asking it to make a declaration that the acts and omissions amounted to corruption and abuse of power which is within its power,” he stated.

Continuing he said, “I think the ruling is absurd and preposterous, it seeks to defeat the very essence of the work that they do and it means they cannot exercise the powers that has been conferred on it by the constitution of the land.”

He said CHRAJ never gave the pressure group any hearing and the argument being put forward by the commission as flawed.

“The first matter was that the case was in court and that was not true at all because Mumuni's matter has long been concluded and judgment has given and what have you and if CHRAJ had consulted us or given us a hearing before going ahead with its decision they would have been clear,” he said.

He continued that if they had given a hearing “we would have made it amply clear to them as a matter of fact Mumuni matter has long been concluded by the courts'.

He debunked the suggestions that the case in court tied up the commission's hands into investigating the issue.

“If it was pending before court, the issue as contested by him (Mumuni) is that of defamation, he filed a defamation suit, he never filed a suit to challenge the veracity of the findings of the audit report,” he noted.

He said the decision by the commission not to investigate the matter is a disgrace to the nation.

It would be re-called that apart from petitioning CHRAJ, AFAG also petitioned President John Mills, asking him to revoke the appointment of Alhaji Mohammed Mumuni as the Minister for Foreign Affairs.

The petition, signed by the group's secretary, Arnold Boateng, stated that the need for the President to fire Mumuni was because of the adverse findings on him by the final forensic audit report which was conducted at the request of the Auditor General.

“As is the practice, whenever a civil or public servant is indicted by a report of the Auditor-General, that person is interdicted and compelled to step aside; pending the conclusion of investigations into that person's involvement in the specific matters in the subject of the audit report,” AFAG noted.

The group said the issue of Alhaji Mumuni has a real likelihood of being an enormous dent on the government's track record of accountability and good governance.

The petition noted: “It cannot be denied that the issues relating to the involvement of the incumbent Minister for Foreign Affairs, Alhaji Muhammad Mumuni, in the disbursement of colossal amounts of state funds in the years 1999/2000, have a huge tendency on undermining the efforts of Your Excellency in building a government which measures up to the yardstick of good governance and also substantially erodes the capacity of the Honourable Foreign Minister to be a creditable chief ambassador of the nation in the eyes of the international community.

“The defamatory findings made against the Honourable Minister are still part of the public record; same have not been set aside by a financial tribunal or court of competent jurisdiction. In the eyes of the public and international community, the Minister is indicted of the offences he is alleged to have committed by the report of an audit body duly constituted by the Auditor-General of the Republic of Ghana.”

AFAG reminded the President that the group had, even before the appointment of Alhaji Mumuni, maintained that he purges himself of the findings of the said damning report but he refused and went ahead to face the Appointments Committee for a vetting session that was enveloped in controversy and drama.