Who Is To Blame, Dr. Abbey?

By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.

The Executive Director of the Center for Policy Analysis is dead-on-target, when Dr. Joe Abbey poignantly laments the fact that the country might have reached the brink, a little push over which might almost certainly land us in an irreversible state of anomie (See "We Can't Continue Destroying Ourselves - Dr. Joe Abbey" Graphic.com.gh/ Ghanaweb.com 5/18/13).

One problem that the renowned Ghanaian economist aptly highlights is the apparent loss of confidence in the Ghanaian judicial system; indeed, so bad has the situation become that recently the young, albeit insufferably insolent, general-secretary of the politically marginal People's National Convention (PNC) easily succeeded in getting the highly politicized Supreme Court of Ghana to ill-advisedly reverse itself in the matter of Constitutional Instrument 74 or CI-74. The latter borders on a traditionally recognized protocol by which the Judicial Council of Ghana establishes rules by which landmark cases, such as the Akufo-Addo/NPP petition challenging the electoral legitimacy of President John Dramani Mahama, are decided.

Mr. Bernard Mornah, the PNC's largely idle scribe, who had reportedly been goaded on by Dr. Raymond Atuguba, the executive chief-of-staff of the Mahama presidency, curiously succeeded in getting the Supreme Court to summarily abrogate its constitutional role and authority as the nation's court of last resort. In the aforesaid ruling, Mr. Mornah managed to get some jurists on the highest court of the land to authorize the right of any of the key players in the Akufo-Addo petition to flatly reject the finality of any decision or verdict handed down by the Atuguba-presided panel.

And on the preceding score ought to be promptly observed the fact that both Justice William Atuguba and Dr. Raymond Atuguba are blood relatives who owe their respective appointments to leaders of the National Democratic Congress. And while it goes without saying that Dr. Abbey's is a sound and logical admonishment to all well-meaning Ghanaian citizens to, literally, get our acts together, as it were, the fact still remains that we cannot build a cohesive and progressive polity with half of the population of the country inexorably poised towards having its own way, at all costs and by any necessary means.

The foregoing, of course, inescapably encapsulates the intransigent operational mode (or modus operandi) of the Mahama-led and Rawlings-minted National Democratic Congress, the only political party in the postcolonial history of Ghana responsible for the brutal assassination of high court judges.

I am no economist, nevertheless, I make bold to vehemently disagree with Dr. Abbey that the precipitous depreciation in the value of Ghana's national currency, the CEDI, had anything to do with the progressive and landmark decision of the Wood Court, under global pressure, to allow the Akufo-Addo Electoral Revolution to be televised. The patently unwise "Ahmedinejad Socialist" policies of the Mahama government and the latter's attendant pitting of the National Democratic Congress government against our traditional Western allies, particularly Britain, the United States and Israel, may have far more to do with vitiated investor confidence than the all-too-salutary quest for justice on the part of the Danquah-Dombo-Busia school of proto-democratic Ghanaians.

It could also not be that the mere televising of the Akufo-Addo Revolution might have caused any significant slump in the national productivity of a country whose citizens are generally not well known for maintaining a remarkably high level of occupational discipline or labor ethic. Almost every significant Ghanaian leader has profusely lamented the cripplingly lethargic Ghanaian attitude towards labor, especially government-sponsored labor. This, of course, is not a very palatable observation to make.

The problem of "too many holidays - national, cultural, religious - too many days that employers are expected to be paying for no work done," ought to be squarely laid on the doorstep of the party and ideological bloc that has dominated Ghana's political landscape for most of the last thirty-and-odd years.

Indeed, no levelheaded Ghanaian can quibble with the need to both forge and invest great confidence in our national institutions; but such massive investment must be reciprocated with good and impartial governance. And I am afraid the Afari-Gyan-led Electoral Commission (EC) has yet to qualify for the unreserved trust and confidence of the Ghanaian electorate.

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*Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.
Department of English
Nassau Community College of SUNY
Garden City, New York
May 17, 2013
E-mail: okoampaahoofe@optimum.net
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