Supreme Court Judges Also Have Free-Speech Rights

I would rather that the two justices of the Supreme Court, namely, Chief Justice Sophia AB Akuffo, and Associate Justice Jones M Dotse, had not directly and personally confronted Dr. Raymond Atuguba in the forum of the law conference that was hosted by the Ghana Institute of Management and Public Administration (GIMPA). But it is also absurd for anybody to suggest that in directly and spontaneously responding to the clearly skewed findings of the University of Ghana’s Law Faculty lecturer, somehow, Justices Akuffo and Dotse had inappropriately assaulted the free-speech rights of Dr. Atuguba, as rather curiously maintained by an Accra-based lawyer by the name of Dr. Rainer Akumperigya (See “Chief Justice’s Comment on Atuguba’s Research ‘Affront to Free Speech’ – Lawyer” Citifmonline.com / Ghanaweb.com 2/18/18).

By the way, who told Dr. Akumperigya, or any other critic, for that matter, that the free-speech rights enshrined in Ghana’s 1992 Republican Constitution did not include the inalienable free-speech rights of Justices Akuffo and Dotse? Or are we being made to believe and accept the patently false and alien premise that once any citizen of the country became a member of any of the three branches of democratic governance, especially the judiciary, they automatically lost their inalienable right to free speech? You see, I personally wish that the two justices named herein had not responded directly to the rather provocative and ideologically tendentious presentation by Dr. Atuguba, primarily because of the awe which Supreme Court judges inspire by their very status in Ghanaian society.

But it is equally inexcusably gratuitous for the likes of Dr. Akumperigya to smugly assert that the critics had jumped the gun by not first critically, systematically and extensively subjecting Dr. Atuguba’s presentation to the requisite scrutiny. After all, what was the purpose of such academic and/or professional presentation but to open up a robust and salutary discussion on the purported case study of some 100 politically charged cases that Dr. Atuguba claims to have studied, in which nearly each and every member of the proverbial Supreme Bench had reached their decisions exclusively on the basis of which President and/or political party had named them to the Bench. If such discursive conclusion is not rather facile and professionally insulting, what else is?

This, however, is not in any way to suggest that I have been pleased or morally satisfied with many of the landmark decisions handed down by the Apex Court in recent times or years. Dr. Atuguba’s alleged research findings dishonestly and unconscionably cast some of the finest brains on the highest court of the land in the sterile and vacuously mechanical mold of some automatons or robots. But that the supporters of former President Mahama’s Executive-Secretary are unwisely and adamantly refusing to see this equally significant aspect of the debate as perfectly legitimate, is what makes matters all the more disturbing. At any rate, I would rather have had Justices Akuffo and Dotse, and any of their other interested associates on the Supreme Bench, to have written and published their well-needed and desired response in one of our major newspapers, with a subsequent and more extensive version scheduled for a peer-reviewed journal at a later, but not too distant, date.

Truth be told: Dr. Atuguba is a virulently passionate partisan ideologue who ought not to be allowed to get away with such capital professional crime. No, we no go sit down make us f...k us up with facile sophistry every day. Oh, no!

*Visit my blog at: kwameokoampaahoofe.wordpress.com Ghanaffairs

By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.
English Department, SUNY-Nassau
Garden City, New York
February 18, 2018
E-mail: [email protected]