Mr. Baako Clearly Meant “Imprudent,” Not “Impudent”

The news article that carried the opinion of the renowned and quite well-respected Editor-in-Chief of the New Crusading Guide newspaper was sensationally captioned “Freeing Delta 8 ‘Politically Impudent [sic] – Kweku Baako” Adomonline.com / Ghanaweb.com 5/17/17). I strongly suspect that there was an editorial blooper here; and that the word “impudent” that appears in the caption of the article ought to have been written and read as “imprudent,” that is, unwise or uncircumspect, and not “impudent,” which means the lack of any sense of shame.

But, of course, this does not in any way, whatsoever, detract from the fact that Mr. Baako’s vehement disagreement with the decision by the Asante Regional Principal State Attorney to promptly dismiss the case against the Delta 8 suspects, accused of forcibly springing 13 members of the Delta Force militia group out of judicial custody of the Kumasi Circuit Court, has absolutely no legs to stand on, either politically or judicially.

As most of my readers may already know, I once in the past clashed with Mr. Baako on the question of the integrity of Chairman Jerry John Rawlings, but I have not stopped admiring the Editor-in-Chief of the New Crusading Guide for the informed professionalism that he brings to his often frank and hard-hitting brand of political journalism. Even so, I also deeply recognize the leftist – you may even choose to call it the inescapably “Nkrumaist” – coloration of his views or takes on matters political and ideological. In the case of the charges preferred against the 8 Delta Force members, we are told that Ms. Marie-Louise Simmons, the Asante Region’s Senior State Attorney, studied a duplicate copy of the police’s docket on the case and promptly came to the professionally savvy conclusion that the State or Government did not have enough evidence to carry on with the case.

The State or Government, in the present context, is to be clearly distinguished from the Akufo-Addo-led government of the New Patriotic Party (NPP). It is to be clearly understood as the non-partisan institution of the executive. Of course, no political or administrative establishment is that functionally perfect. At any rate, we are further informed that it was Ms. Marie-Louise Simmons, the Asante Regional Senior State Attorney, who signed off on the dismissal of the charges against the Delta 8 on behalf of the Chief or Principal State Attorney of the Asante Region, whose name and gender we are not given. Not that it would matter anyhow. Because at the end of the day, it is the police-drafted contents of the docket that matters. And the Kumasi police, to all intents and purposes, had allegedly not provided enough evidence to nail down the case or have the defendants easily found guilty, which is what good prosecutors and state attorneys worth their nominal designation routinely expect when they take up a case for trial and/or prosecution before the courts.

Faulting the Attorney-General’s Office or her representatives in the Asante Region, as Mr. Baako clearly does, for dismissing the charges against the Delta 8, without referring it to Headquarters, is neither here nor there, unless, of course, it could be proven that, somehow, getting Attorney-General Gloria Akuffo directly involved in the case could suddenly and magically cause the police’s docket to be refilled, brimful, with all the hitherto missing details that would make the docket sweetly sing the right, or desired, tune the second time around, as it were. Needless to say, whether dismissing the case against the Delta 8 criminal suspects is “politically imprudent” or not is inescapably beside the point or contextually immaterial here, because at the end of the day falsifying evidence to make a case “politically prudent” or expedient is not the primary obligation of either the operatives of the Attorney-General’s Office or personnel of the Criminal Investigations Division (CID) of the Ghana Police Service. And heavy-lifting critics like Mr. Baako had better quickly and constructively learn to maturely deal with the same.

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By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.
English Department, SUNY-Nassau
Garden City, New York
May 22, 2017
E-mail: [email protected]