Shallow Questions, Deep Answers

Kwasi Ansu-Kyeremeh

Unable to tell these days is whether it is a blessing or a curse that I never became a learned friend. I have been employing their services recently because you cannot be a chief in this our motherland without litigating on behalf of your community.

Unable to gain entry into the 'I put it to you confraternity,' I have come to console myself with whatever else. Never will I ever curse three deans for denying me that opportunity with their bar unwelcome references.

No regrets, at all, because when I listen to, or read or watch the learned people putting to between them or among them, sometimes there is this feeling of cringing or getting irritated. I get the impression a lawyer should provoke the witness to explode and throw a tantrum like a toddler.

In ordinary life, many of my compatriots would say provocation. In law, they might use this provocation to exonerate someone who has broken the law. So when I read or listen to or see a witness being provoked, I wonder why that should be accepted as in law.

So far, it has not been much of an excitement. It's been much mathematical illogic. Eleven thousand one hundred and thirty-eight minus 144 still leaves massive stolen votes. What counsel for the beneficiary and the perpetrator and the intruder have been speculating is double or triple counting of certain votes.

They seem to be thinking that if for one polling station you deduct 500 for no verification votes, another 500 for unsigned results and yet another 500 for over-voting, it means you are taking away 1500 votes for that polling station whose total votes could be less than the 1500.

The Yaa Nimdeℇ Mahammadu man, on the other hand, is saying, yes, I gave you that evidence with those multiple (three) infractions in that one polling station but I actually counted all three as one polling station in computing the stolen votes. You may thus count that as less than 11,138 polling stations because some polling stations have those repetitions. It's shallow questions, deep answers.

What my (Nimdeℇ Mahammadu) numbers say is that infractions occurred 11,138 times and not necessarily that number of polling stations. This is definitely different from the number of infraction votes taken out of a polling station vote. In short, it is Mahammadu analysis.

Touted as a financial wizard, the cross-examiner's monetary wizardly landed the motherland in a heavy financial loss for which some justice was exacted.  Those were the days when accountability worked. It's unlike today when over GHC51 million has gone awol with no one to account for its judgment debt orchestrated looting.

As for my compatriots and I, we are waiting for the legal wizardly to unfold and illuminate an apparently boring and dour cross-examination of a very smart son of the motherland. He, as a witness, has shown his stuff, counsel badgering and shouting nevertheless.

Someone asked how anyone could think that he could trick or deceive someone a signature examiner of many years of his life with a difference between an original signature and its electronic version.

If I didn't know, that is not how legal wizardly works. The good lawyers I know don't do that.

Of course judgment is in the bosom of the judge. We mortal onlookers can say whatever about what we think is legal wizardly. They will deliver the judgment, and they alone can tell whether what is on display is legal wizardly.

It seems, for judges, even the demeanor and any manner in which they carry themselves during a trial are immaterial. If that were not so, they would be predictable. But the way I see judgment, it is hardly ever predictable.

In the days when I used to edit a publication, I commissioned a research which showed that in all thirteen judgment scripts of cases involving journalists examined, judges opted for the free speech constricting Article 164 of the 1992 Constitution to convict those who were tried.

Baffled, uncomfortable and not dare brand the judges as anti-free speech, I approached one of them to do a piece for the publication about the issue of the propensity of judges, then, to convict media people accused of constitutional and legal breaches. The eminent, not frivolous, retired supreme law justice simply wrote: 'It is for the courts to say….'

Ever since, I have come to appreciate that, as said earlier, justice is what the judge pronounces irrespective of any speculation in terms of evidence adduced, deduced, produced, assumed or verified. It is what the judge says finally that matters.

Thus, cross-examination can be wizardly or ordinary to you and I. What the judge sees is what matters. However, you will never know what the judge sees until judgment is pronounced.

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