I Think I Like This Chief Justice

There has been a lull over the ruckus at the Electoral Commission (EC) for quite a healthy while now. Which is all well and good, largely because of Chief Justice Sophia AB Akuffo. She has an enviably take-charge attitude towards her job, an enviable quality that was woefully lacking in a couple of her predecessors. The last female and first Chief Justice of her gender, namely, Mrs. Georgina Theodora Wood (nééLutterodt), appeared to have effectively been neutralized and held hostage by the operatives of the rag-tag, tandem regimes of the Mills- and Mahama-led National Democratic Congress (NDC), who pathologically envisaged all the cardinal institutions in the country, especially the judicial system and appointees not put on the court by either Chairman Jerry John Rawlings, the founding-patriarch of the NDC, or Messrs. Mills and Mahama, through skewed ideological lenses.

Which means that whatever decisions these lambent-witted jurists, for the most part, rendered were invariably perceived to be motivated by factors other than the fundamental issues over which such decisions or judgments were predicated. If Chief Justice Wood appeared to be relatively more vulnerable and therefore less effective, it was primarily because 80-percent of her tenure as Head of the highest court of the land was literally spent in “Enemy Territory.” There was, for instance, that flagrant moment of national contretemps when then-President John Evans Atta-Mills, deceased, conspicuously ignored Chief Justice Wood during a State-of-the-Nation Address before a sitting of the Full-House of Ghana’s Parliament, which was equally jampacked with members of the diplomatic corps. It was unarguably at once the most embarrassing and humiliating moment in our postcolonial history.

Since the President was to shortly profusely apologize for his scandalous and diplomatically bizarre snub, we can perhaps safely assume that such morally flabbergasting faux-pas was very likely unintended on the part of the protagonist. But, of course, the same could not be said of Mr. Koku Anyidoho, the Atta-Mills Communications Director, who had once publicly stated that he found the personality and visage of former President John Agyekum-Kufuor to be at once most unprepossessing and insufferably repugnant. Like his boss, Mr. Anyidoho would be forced to shortly render a public apology. In the case of the Wood snub, I am not ashamed to publicly confess that I was convulsively goose-bumped and did, in fact, shed a tear or two. I felt psychically wounded to my cockles and never thought I would be able to overcome such morally excruciating hurt and pain.

Such humiliation and studied disdain would, of course, see no let, as either NDC key operatives or their assigns and hirelings piled one form of abuse upon another on the Chief Justice and her associates. At the nadir of such pile-on of vitriol, you also had that group of three urchins of dubious parentage, called the Montie Trio/Montie Three, who publicly vowed on the radio to have Mrs. Wood royally and criminally violated. They had the tacit approval of then-President John Dramani Mahama, who would artlessly use the rubberstamping membership of his largely handpicked Council-of-State to give assent to the swashbuckling and heretical rhetoric of the Montie Trio, by having the latter’s three-month prison sentence revoked halfway through. Well, isn’t it rather interesting to learn that the no-nonsense jurist who slapped the Montie Troglodytes with their prison sentences was then-Associate Justice Sophia Akuffo?

I have this three-page printout before me, captioned “Chief Justice Warns Against Contemptuous Comments Ahead of EC Probe” (Daily Guide / Modernghana.com 12/19/17). It is about Justice Akuffo’s inauguration of a five-person committee charged with investigating allegations of mismanagement and gross administrative incompetence, largely verging on the misuse of taxpayer monies. The establishment of the investigative team, composed of members of the Judicial Council and the Supreme Court, was occasioned by two separate petitions presented to President Addo DankwaAkufo-Addo by some middle-level and junior staff members of the EC against the EC’s Chair and her two deputies, namely, Mrs. Georgina Opoku-Amankwa and Mr. AmaduSulley. Already, NDC apparatchiks like Mr. Johnson Asiedu-Nketia, the party’s General-Secretary, are crying foul.

Some, like Messrs. Anyidoho, the ever-scheming Asiedu-Nketia second-bananas, and Abraham Amaliba, the hopelessly failed politician and also-run lawyer, have sworn to set Ghana ablaze, if the EC’s Chair is removed from her post. Chief Justice Akuffo says that these rustic bumpkins and guttersnipes had better shut up or put up and let the laws of the land decide. They had better not quixotically push their luck.

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