Raymond Atuguba Is A Hardnosed Professional Politician, Period!

In all the brouhaha or hoopla swirling around the recent presentation by Dr. Raymond Atuguba, of a conference paper that curiously claimed that virtually every member of the Ghana Supreme Court rules on politically charged issues squarely on the basis of the President and/or the political party that put him or her onto the Supreme Bench, what has been conveniently and conspicuously omitted from the debate is the fact that the University of Ghana’s Law Faculty senior lecturer is also a hard-hitting professional politician and a heavyweight executive player who served as Executive Secretary – no pun intended here – to former President John Dramani Mahama.

What the foregoing means is that rather than treat Dr. Atuguba as an ordinary academic and political underdog, the quite prolific scholar-researcher, at least going by his published curriculum vitae on the web, ought to be squarely envisaged as a smooth-operating all-purpose Ghanaian citizen who is bifocal or fairly equally a hardnosed politician and an academician.

What is also being scandalously ignored is the glaring and inescapable fact that Dr. Atuguba is a diehard front-row operative of the National Democratic Congress (NDC) and the latter’s antecedent, the erstwhile so-called Provisional National Defense Council (PNDC), both of which were created and led by Chairman Jerry John Rawlings. Indeed, neither the NDC nor the PNDC has an enviable track-record vis-à-vis the jealous promotion and protection of the inalienable right to free speech and expression of the average Ghanaian citizen, let alone an intellectual heavyweight, relatively speaking, like Dr. Atuguba.

Consequently, any mischievous attempt to make the Senior Lecturer of the University of Ghana’s Law Faculty seem like the underdog here, wickedly and unwisely and cheaply economizes the truth and reality of the ideological principles doggedly represented by the former Mahama Presidential Executive-Secretary. We must also strictly underscore the fact that Dr. Atuguba’s “scholarly quest” to trivializing the credibility of the judiciary, in particular the Ghana Supreme Court, is an integral part of the grand scheme or strategy of both the key operatives of the present main opposition National Democratic Congress and the erstwhile Mahama-led government of the National Democratic Congress.

Needless to say, the P/NDC has a well-documented history of systematically undermining the institutional credibility of the highest echelons of the judicial system. In the past, the Rawlings-Tsikata diarchy of the P/NDC has engineered the Mafia-style assassination of Ghanaian Superior Court Judges. And so the obviously politically motivated “research” findings of Dr. Atuguba cannot be permitted to go unchallenged. At any rate, isn’t the critical interrogation of all forms of research, particularly academic research, subject to the sort of robust scrutiny wisely suggested by Chief Justice Sophia AB Akuffo and Associate Justice Jones M Dotse? It goes without saying that it was hardly out of line for Chief Justice Akuffo to characterize Dr. Atuguba’s so-called research findings as insufferably hostile and dangerous to the otherwise healthy judicial culture of the country, under the Akufo-Addo-led unabashedly neoliberal government of the New Patriotic Party.

Indeed, what is inescapably dangerous in the raging debate surrounding Dr. Atuguba’s conference presentation is the brazen pretense by those in his Amen Corner, or fellow ideological truckers, to the sinister idea that, somehow, the members of the judiciary have absolutely no right to promptly respond to devious “academic attacks” suavely coated with the “innocent” label of Ivy-gilt scholarship. Needless to say, the days when just about anybody in the pay of the Rawlings-minted P/NDC could punchbag the members of the judiciary and facilely get away with the same are decidedly passé. And the P/NDC Abongo Boys and Girls had better get this new sociopolitical reality loud and clear.

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