By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.
I happen to vehemently disagree with Nana Ato Dadzie's rather mischievous assertion that Mr. Francis Yaonasu Kpegah, the disgruntled former jurist on Ghana's Supreme Court, has a legal and constitutional right to falsely and maliciously defame Nana Akufo-Addo by filing an at once frivolous and scandalous lawsuit with the Fast-Track High Court in Accra (See "Nana Addo Is A Lawyer - Ato Dadzie" Citifmonline.com/ Ghanaweb.com 5/5/13).
I vehemently disagree with former Chairman Rawlings' Chief-of-Staff because as a retired judge of Ghana's Supreme Court, Mr. Kpegah is expected to know better not to wastefully engage the taxpayer-supported resources of the country's judicial system. Furthermore, the fact that the Fast-Track High Court has summarily dismissed Mr. Kpegah's suit on substantive grounds of evidentiary lack of merit, ought to stop this publicity hound from disturbing the peace and quiet of the 2012 presidential candidate of the New Patriotic Party (NPP).
And on the latter score, maybe somebody ought to apprise Nana Ato Dadzie and his cohorts of mischief-makers and pretenders to the staunch defense of civil rights, that Mr. Kpegah has absolutely no right, whatsoever, to harass Nana Akufo-Addo merely because he has the capricious urge of doing so.
Indeed, Nana Akufo-Addo has the right to have Mr. Kpegah promptly arrested and prosecuted for such morbid indulgence. I also happen to think that irrespective of his allegedly ailing health, the lawyers for Nana Akufo-Addo ought to proceed to court to get Mr. Kpegah summarily stripped of his patently undeserved status as a "Justice Emeritus" of the Supreme Court of Ghana, at least if only to serve as a deterrent to any National Democratic Congress (NDC) members, supporters and/or sympathizers who may be contemplating any such distractive gimmickry in the near future.
At any rate, as I noted in a previous write-up not quite awhile ago, the authenticity of the credentials of Nana Akufo-Addo does not, in any way, depend on the personal testimony of rascally political hacks like Nana Ato Dadzie; rather, Nana Akufo-Addo's legal credentials are a matter of public record. The latter was precisely what the Accra Fast-Track High Court intended to alert the Ghanaian and global public to, when the AFTHC summarily and resoundingly dismissed the Kpegah suit.
It also predictably appears that in the wake of the definitive dismissal of his indisputably noetic lawsuit against Nana Akufo-Addo, Mr. Kpegah has decided to go down the face-saving road of pleading clinical insanity, thus his widely publicized ill-health and disheveled public appearance in court recently. Some moral reprobate even suggested in a Ghanaweb.com opinion column, if memory serves me accurately, that this rabidly virulent Akufo-Addo detractor deserves our "empathy" rather than our condign condemnation.
Interestingly, it was the same writer who once accused my maternal grandfather, the Rev. T. H. Sintim (1896-1982) of having haughtily caused his own gun-point deportation from the Asante Regional capital in 1932, as the first African/Ghanaian headmaster of the Adum Presbyterian Primary School. My granfather's sole capital crime was that he was an Okyeni presuming to head and manage an Asante missionary school.
Maybe if he were sensible enough, that SOB would have done some decent reasearch and asked of the descendants of my grandfather's Adum Presbyterian Church and School deporters why they insisted on purchasing a lavish and jumbo casket in which to bury the old man at Akyem-Asiakwa on January 8, 1982.
But an even more significant question is as follows: Would Mr. Whatchamacallit be pleading for "empathy" for Nana Akufo-Addo's inveterate enemy and detractor, if Mr. Kpegah had emerged victorious in his so-called "Thriller-in-Manila" attempt to humiliate and destroy the hard-earned legal reputation of W. A. D. Akufo-Addo? It makes you wonder whether all these Elephant-Swearing Crusaders are really on the side of democratic justice - no pun intended - where the ongoing Akufo-Addo/NPP Supreme Court petition is concerned.
__________________________________________________ *Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D. Department of English Nassau Community College of SUNY Garden City, New York May 5, 2013 E-mail: [email protected] ###