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

I don't know how this Mr. Abraham Amaliba got to become a member of the National Democratic Congress' Legal Team (NDC-LT), but he surely sounds like he really belongs among the rascally company of Nana Ato Dadzie, Tony Lithur and Tsatsu Tsikata, the much touted legal maven whose greatest claim to fame is that he may well be the only Oxbridge-educated Ghanaian to have used his privileged legal education to cream, or savagely and bindly rob, the Ghanaian taxpayer.

And, of course, the condign price for his purportedly nonesuch genius was to have landed himself a berth as an inmate of the globally infamous Nsawam Medium-Security Prison. You see, what makes the Nsawam sojourn of Mr. Tsatsu Tsikata unique is the fact that he served his prison sentence at the Kwame Nkrumah Institute for Ideological Liquidation for practicing the ignoble art of kleptocracy, rather than merely holding a dissenting ideological view and/or opinion from that of his political overlords, the way of, say, Messrs. Koi-Larbi and William (Paa Willie) Ofori-Atta.

But for the painfully embarrassing fact that the Ghanaian legal system does not appear to be functioning in as salutary a way as it ought to, the fart-smirking-faced Mr. Tsikata would not be treading anywhere near the august edifice of the Supreme Court of Ghana, let alone presume to represent the political interests and fortunes of the ruling National Democratic Congress. And does he feel any twinge of conscience - assuming that he has any capacity for the same - whenever he is confronted with the statuettes of the brutally assassinated Supreme Court judges?

Then again, really, what am I talking about here? For, isn't the NDC the veritable and vintage mintage of the Trokosi Wing of the National Democratic Congress? In a real sense, though, the fact that the Mahama-led National Democratic Congress would so callously solicit the legal services of a convicted criminal like Mr. Tsikata, goes to show both the Ghanaian public and the global community the stuff of which the key operatives of the NDC are made.

At any rate, what inspired me to compose this write-up, in local Ghanaian parlance, was a news report that appeared in the Ghanaweb.com edition of April 26, 2013, in which the notorious and jarringly stentorian Mr. Amaliba, a veritable nuisance, to be certain, was widely reported to be saying that he would readily trade his very life - or existence - in exchange for hearing Mr. Tsikata deftly and methodically poke holes into the indisputably damning and formidably assembled forensic evidence presented by the cognitively and statistically astute and redoubtable Dr. Mahamudu Bawumia to the Atuguba-led panel of Supreme Court jurists, seeking to aptly rectify Dr. Afari-Gyan's willful and dastardly rigging of Election 2012 in favor of President John Dramani Mahama (See "I Want to Listen to Tsatsu Tsikata Before I Die - Lawyer Amaliba" Ghanaweb.com 4/26/13).

From the afore-referenced news report, the critical thinker arrives at two logical interpretations. First, is the obvious fact that in the "lawyerly" opinion of Mr. Amaliba, Messrs. Ato Dadzie and Tony Lithur appear to have disconsolately disppointed both their clients and their ideological supporters and sympathizers; in other words, the lawyers for the first two respondents in the Akufo-Addo/NPP petition have been a gaping a flop.

Not surprisingly, therefore, Mr. Tsatsu Tsikata is curiously made to seem to be in possession of some sort of "open-sesame" key to up-ending the forensically inviolable reality of the flagrant, criminal and collaborative collusion between the Afari-Gyan-headed Electoral Commission (EC) and the Mahama-led National Democratic Congress.

The Akan have a saying that: "If you don't know the looks (or appearance) of death, just look at a sleeping wo/man." Put in another idiomatic way, "What value is it for a naked wo/man to promise you a bolt of cloth?"

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*Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.
Department of English
Nassau Community College of SUNY
Garden City, New York
April 26, 2013
E-mail: okoampaahoofe@optimum.net
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