Joachim Amartey Kwei Was Just a Scapegoat

There are really no “missing links” to the June 30, 1982 ethnocentric abduction and brutal assassination of the three Akan-descended Accra High Court Judges and the retired Major of the Ghana Armed Forces, Mr. Samuel Acquah. Oftentimes, in narrating this at once most grisly and heinous crime of the so-called Rawlings Revolution, the name of Major Acquah is omitted. The latter was the Managing-Director of the Ghana Industrial Holdings Corporation (GIHOC), the Nkrumah-funded seminal industrial base of the country, when the soon-to-be Member of the Provisional National Defense Council (PNDC), Mr. Joachim Amartey Kwei, was the GIHOC Union Leader who led a regiment of striking workers to ransack the Third-Republican Parliament House Building. In the process, the windows of the old parliament building were vandalized. The striking workers also forced themselves into the kitchen of our National Assembly and helped themselves to the lunch prepared for our elected representatives, after which they savagely laid most of the chinaware in our National Assembly, Bastille Fashion, literally to waste.

Mr. Amartey Kwei had an obvious cause for revenge, obviously because he was one of the over 100 GIHOC employees who were dismissed by a legitimately constituted judicial trial presided over by the three slain superior court judges, namely, Messrs. Frederick Poku-Sarkodie and Kwadwo Agyei Agyepong, and Mrs. Cecilia Koranteng-Addow, a newly delivered mother who was nursing her then three-month-old daughter, if memory serves this writer accurately. But the Rawlings-Tsikata Tribal Revolutionary Cabal also had their own grievances against these three High Court Judges, who were actually Supreme Court Judges whose status as Apex Court Judges had been summarily reduced to that of Superior or High Court Judges, as a result of the Ignatius Kutu Acheampong-led junta of the Supreme Military Council (SMC-I) having summarily abolished the institutional legitimacy of the Supreme Court of Ghana. The leaders of the SMC apparently resented the idea of an Apex Court that seemed to rival its authority, at least in nominal designation.

This column, by the way, was inspired by a news report captioned “Who Killed the Judges: Baako Reveals Missing Links of Damning History” (MyJoyOnline.com / Ghanaweb.com 10/6/18), in which the Editor-Publisher of the New Crusading Guide, Mr. Abdul-Malik Kweku Baako, was reported to have appeared on a Joy News-sponsored news analysis and current affairs program, in which the son of the famous Nkrumah lieutenant and faux political theorist, Mr. Kofi Baako, claimed that Messrs. Jerry John Rawlings and his cousin and then National Security Adviser, Capt. (Rd) Kojo Tsikata, may have been more direly mired in the events and circumstances leading to the Mafia-style assassination of the three Accra High Court Judges.

For starters, Mr. Baako tells his audiences that by July 4, 1982, when then-Chairman Rawlings, head of the so-called Provisional National Defense Council (PNDC) addressed the nation in a simulcast, the revolutionary junta leader had been fully aware of the fact that Justices Koranteng-Addow, Agyepong and Poku-Sarkodie had been summarily executed, Mafia style, for at least some 48 hours, or two days. And yet, Chairman Rawlings, according to Mr. Baako, in his radio and television address to the nation had pretended as if his government was unaware of the fact of the brutal assassination of the judges. Two days earlier, according to the Editor-Publisher of the New Crusading Guide, Mr. Amartey Kwei, one of the couple of civilian PNDC cabinet members, had appeared at the Gondar Barracks headquarters of the PNDC and euphorically announced to a full-seating of cabinet that “We have finished them,” meaning that Mr. Amartey Kwei may have personally supervised the brutal liquidation of Mrs. Koranteng-Addow and Messrs. Poku-Sarkodie and Agyei Agyepong. Mr. Amartey Kwei would be hurriedly executed by firing squad, as Ghanaians began to vehemently clamor for justice. And so in a practical sense, Mr. Amartey Kwei could be credibly envisaged as a martyr who saved the proverbial day for the extortionate rule of the PNDC.

Mr. Baako also reveals that at least two audio- or videotapes that hold the clue to the real masterminds behind the assassination of the judges went missing precisely about the same time that these pieces of forensically airtight, or impeccable, evidence were needed in order to enable forensics experts draw definitive conclusions about the liquidation of the three judges and the retired Ghana Armed Forces major. This is absolutely no accident at all, for Messrs. Rawlings and Tsikata had an obvious axe to grind with the slain judges who were perceived to have criminally corrupted the integrity of the June 4^th Revolution by their judicial reversal of some of the clearly retributive and vindictive punitive gains supposedly notched by the key operatives of the erstwhile Armed Forces Revolutionary Council (AFRC), by conscientiously bringing democratic justice and the civilized rule of law to bear on the genuine and morally righteous grievances of some honest and hardworking victims of the revolutionary witch-hunt by Messrs. Rawlings and Tsikata.

The preceding also constitutes the “radical” or foundational history of the Rawlings-founded political juggernaut that is the so-called National Democratic Congress (NDC), the current main opposition party in the country.

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By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., PhD
English Department, SUNY-Nassau
Garden City, New York
October 6, 2018
E-mail: [email protected]