Former Minister of Justice and Attorney General, Mr. Martin A. B. Amidu, grew up in Daduri, Bawku in the Upper East Region.
Mr. Amidu apparently loved his sleep and in the mornings would refuse to go to school and try to scream down the sky over the neighbourhood in protest, which often upset and made his mother angry, whereupon, she would drag him screaming and protesting, one of her hands to his ear and the other clutching a whip, all the way to school.
But he later became a real bookworm, and subsequently one of the nation’s most astute legal brains, and a self-proclaimed ‘citizen vigilante’ who has become the toast of the nation.
Unlike many high-profile lawyers of his generation, Mr. Amidu did not attend the best of second cycle schools.
After elementary school, he gained admission to a private educational institution in Tamale housed in makeshift structures and designated a commercial school by its founder and headmaster, Mr. Ben Gogoe.
Thanks to a thriving reading culture among schoolchildren at the time, he became obsessed with the world of books.
As the years went by, Mr. Amidu was obsessed with books, but especially political science books. He fed ravenously on Marx and Engels.
After law school, Mr. Amidu, like many young intellectuals of the time who had the outlook of ‘progressives,’ drifted into the emerging leftist politics of the June Four Movement.
Mr. Amidu graduated from the University of Ghana in 1976 with an LLB (Hons) and the Ghana Law School in 1978 with a Barrister/Solicitor at Law (BL) degree.
He also holds a Master of Arts Degree in Conflict Resolution from the Antioch University, Ohio, USA. The former attorney-general and minister of justice joined the opposition National Democratic Congress in 1992.
He was the party’s vice-presidential candidate in the December 2000 presidential elections which the NDC presidential candidate, the late Professor J. E.A Mills, lost to the New Patriotic Party’s (NPP’s) John Agyekum Kufuor.
The NPP’s electoral victory notwithstanding, Mr. Amidu insisted he was Ghana’s ‘shadow vice-president.’
Mr. Amidu has served his party’s successive governments variously as Presidential Advisor on Legal Affairs, Minister of the Interior, Attorney-General and Minster for Justice, Deputy Secretary of State for Industry, Science and Technology, Deputy Secretary of State for Local Government and Rural Development and Deputy Secretary of State for Upper East Region.
He has also been in private legal practice as a barrister and solicitor of the Supreme Court of Ghana and also as a private, professional conflict resolution consultant.
He has authored at least six outstanding legal publications ranging from; The power of a court to convict an accused person for a lesser or included offence other than charged, through The qualification and the constitutional position of the Attorney-General to The scope and effect of judicial power in the enforcement and defence of the 1992 Constitution of Ghana.
His new calling as ‘citizen vigilante’ found expression in his introduction late last year, of the now very hackneyed word ‘gargantuan’ into Ghana’s politics, a word he used to describe the scale of fraud he insisted had been perpetuated by his colleagues in government against the state, especially in the fraudulent payment of court judgment debts to organisations and individuals.
Mr. Amidu is married and has three adult children living in Ghana and the United Kingdom (UK).
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