When President Mahama covertly collaborated with Mr. Anas Aremeyaw Anas and the latter’s Tiger-Eye PI team to expose payola-indulging magistrates and superior court judges, some of the snared judges who were dismissed from the bench by the Chief Justice, working in concert with the Judicial Council, or some such branch of the judicial system, were allowed to keep their retirement benefits and other perks because, as Chief Justice Georgina Theodora Wood told the nation, these forensically proven corrupt judges had shown “remorse.”
And so I guess it was this inexcusably misplaced judicial precedent that he was gaily reprising when Mr. Mahama decided to invoke his presidential privilege of pardon to summarily nullify the sentencing of the Montie Three to 4 months’ imprisonment for scandalizing or bringing the image of the Supreme Court of Ghana into abject disrepute. And on the latter score, it goes without saying that the Atuguba-presided 2012 presidential election petition’s judicial panel did as much as the Montie Three to bring the reputation of the Apex Court into irreparable disrepute.
And so in a practical sense, the patently anti-judicial crusader in President Mahama was speaking the flagrantly partisan language of the Wood Supreme Court, when the Gonja petty chieftain decided to cavalierly override the prison sentences of the Montie Three, namely, Messrs. Alistair Tairo Nelson, Salifu Maase (aka Mugabe) and Godwin Ako Gunn. Unlike Mr. Joseph Osei-Owusu, the main opposition New Patriotic Party’s spokesperson on Constitutional, Legal and Parliamentary Affairs, however, I don’t suppose for a split-second that President Mahama was merely behaving like a party activist when he decided to put our perennially waffling and jittery Supreme Court in its place, that is, far off-range from the political vigilantes of the ruling National Democratic Congress.
Many of us have not forgotten the rather lame but all-to-be-expected defense offered by Justice Vida Akoto-Bamfo to the Ghanaian public for voting in support of the National Democratic Congress vis-à-vis the 2012 presidential election petition. According to Mrs. Akoto-Bamfo, her politically motivated vote on the Atuguba panel was to ensure that peace and quiet reigned the land, rather than a question of whether, indeed, the ruling party had won the election fair and square. In other words, justice and fairness were the least bit of the worries of the sixty-something-year-old widow (See “Montie 3 Pardon: Mahama Behaved Like a Party Activist – Osei-Owusu” Citifmonline.com / Modernghana.com 8/23/16).
Contrary to what Mr. Osei-Owusu, the New Patriotic Party’s Member of Parliament for Asante-Bekwai, would have the rest of us believe, even long before he misappropriated his constitutional powers to put the Supreme Court in its place, as it were, Mr. Mahama had never been envisaged as a statesman. In fact, as widely noted on many Ghanaian media websites, the entire 2012 electioneering campaign platform of the Gonja native could be thematically summed up in one word – TRIBALISM. Our elders have said that “You may hate the duiker, but you ought to be honest enough to admire its much-storied graceful gait.”
The fact of the matter is that practiced by Little Dramani, “Tribalism” actually seems like the much-lauded compensatory policy of Affirmative Action. You see, there is this deliberately, perennially and systematically and strategically cultivated culture of tribal nationalism which, practiced outside the so-called Three Northern Regions, reeks of thoroughgoing ethnic chauvinism and pathological xenophobia. On the other hand, practiced within the Three Northern Regions, the Mahama Brand of Tribalism seems as natural as the Four-Fingers-And-The-Thumb. Which is why the kleptocratic SADA development program was so incredibly successful.
When one couples the fact that at least one of the globally infamous Ahwoi Brothers is known to be associated with Montie-Fm, staging venue of President Mahama’s vicious propagandistic assault on the Wood Supreme Court, as either the manager or owner, it becomes inescapably clear that the entire Montie Saga was a well-calculated attempt at plunging the country into a virtual State of Nature milieu, in much the same manner immediately following the brutal assassination of the three Akan-descended Accra High Court judges and the retired Ghana Army major. Any surprises here? Definitely not!