Opinions of Sunday, 19 August 2007
Columnist: Okoampa-Ahoofe, Kwame
Tony Lithur's Bluff Is Rightly Called
There is this apparently quite popular Ghanaian lawyer by the name of Tony Lithur; I do not know much about him, which ought to give nobody any grief. For I have been out of the country some twenty-two years. And I don’t remember hearing much about this evidently loudmouthed and insufferably arrogant guy while I was back there.
And neither does it matter that he is loudmouthed, for that is, obviously, how he earns his keep. He is known to represent almost every prominent member of the opposition so-called National Democratic Congress (NDC). And so he must be feeding very fat, indeed, in view of what we have recently been learning about the SCANCEM-GHACEM payola fiesta.
Couple the preceding with the fact that the last time that we heard of him, Tony Lithur was vehemently in denial of the fact that his primary patron – or is it paymaster? – had had anything financial or monetary to do with the SCANCEM-GHACEM scam-artistry, and a hardly pleasant picture of the man begins to emerge. The truth, it has been said, shall soon be out and about. And so we wait to see. Now Tony Lithur has embarked on another stentorian trip to the Ghana Court of Appeals, this time he is representing Mr. Daniel Abodakpi, the Member of Ghana’s Parliament from Keta who was recently handed the quite decent parcel of a 10-year prison term, for fraudulently causing a whopping $400,000 (American Dollars), earmarked for a public project, to be transferred into the private bank account of a Dr. Frederick Boadu.
You, dear reader, may already be familiar with the socioeconomic concept of “Brain-Drain.” This variation is called “Monetary-Drain,” and it is of the most criminal sort – robbing the indigent and beggarly to pay the roguish and prodigal.
But that is not what we want to talk about today. What we want to talk about today is the fact that Mr. Lithur appears to be wickedly and pathetically caught in a time-warp. He appears to believe that 2007 is still under the terror-charged tenure of the P/NDC, when the lives of high- and supreme-court judges could be routinely contracted for liquidation and extinction at the Bundase Military Range. When raw-fleshed intimidation, rather than sheer legal knack, or acumen, was the judicial lingua franca and modus operandi. At least, we are told, that was the ideological essence of the “revolutionary” teachings of Flt.-Lt. Probity and Accountability.
The foregoing may explain exactly why Mr. Lithur was in court on Monday (August 6, 2007) jiving about Justice Henrietta Abban, one of the judges on the panel of Mr. Abodakpi’s appeal trial, having deliberately interrupted Justice S. T. Farkye, the redoubtable and quite decent judge who handed Mr. Abodakpi his quite decent pre-Easter prison-parcel on February 5, 2007 (see Modernghana.com 8/7/07).
According to Mr. Lithur, while in the process of delivering his now-famous verdict, Justice Farkye received a phone call, which prompted the good, old man to promptly withdraw into the private recesses of his chambers. Mr. Lithur’s quite strange and interesting theory appears to be that since Justice Farkye re-emerged from his chambers looking dour or somewhat mean, at least in the evidently rich and colorful imagination of Tony Lithur, Justice Farkye, perforce, had been unduly influenced in his verdict by the anonymous phone caller. In sum, Mr. Lithur, in attempting to use his “TSIKATRIXSTIC” bully tactics to get Justice Abban to recuse herself from the appellate panel – in essence, bump herself – cynically claimed that he (Tony Lithur) had sustainable forensic evidence indicating that, in fact, the disruptive phone call had originated from Justice Abban, and that it was intended to criminally prejudice the sitting judge against his client. In short, both the professional integrity and judicial competence of Justice Farkye are being impugned by Mr. Lithur.
Needless to say, what ought to be quite interestingly stressed here is the fact that Tony Lithur is not, in anyway, claiming that his client, Mr. Daniel Abodakpi, is not guilty of the charges preferred against the disgraced Keta-MP and former NDC-Finance Minister, which is that Mr. Abodakpi deliberately and fraudulently caused considerable financial loss to Ghana as a trusted cabinet member of the so-called National Democratic Congress.
In sum, what Attorney Lithur is, in the foregoing, implying is that he is as cocksure as Mr. Probity and Accountability that had he not been importuned by the alleged phone call while in the solemn process of rendering his verdict, Justice Farkye would almost indisputably, in the imagination of Mr. Lithur, have given Mr. Abodakpi a proverbial slap on the wrist. Perhaps a week of community service or simply ordering the latter to do a few extra pushups in the Parliamentary gymnasium, that is if, indeed, the august House of Representatives has any.
As was only to be expected, in her rather courageous riposte, Justice Abban dared Attorney Lithur to sue the former in a legitimate court of law, on whose very shark-edged benches, one might quickly note, Justice Abban cut her professional teeth, to prove his case.
Needless to say, should he lose his TSIKATRIXSTIC escapade or gamble, Tony Lithur is almost certain to lose his license to ever practice law in the land of the golden chocolate again, that is, if regulations verging on professional code of conduct by the Ghana Bar Association are still in full force. And if that happens, as it surely ought to, come the TRIAL-OF-THE-CENTURY, otherwise known as the SCANCEM-GHACEM judicial fiesta, loudmouthed Tony “The Bully” Lithur would be watching from the gallery like the rest of us. And I bet Tony would hate to helplessly look on while his grand-paymaster is condignly led off into the land of the other slain but unquenchable panel of three judges – namely, Koranteng-Addow, Agyepong and Sarkodie.
Views expressed by the author(s) do not necessarily reflect those of GhanaHomePage.
