By Dr. Samuel Adjei Sarfo
Attorney and Counselor at Law
The Judgment Debt Commission report is finally out. It essentially repeats what has always been known all along: that high government officials have been complicit in the payments of fraudulent judgment debts. The sense one gets upon reviewing whatever is available in that report is that its work has been so far superficial, and that the social canker of concocting judgment debts for the government to pay up may not now be finally uprooted from the system. I am aware that as far back as from the time of independence and spanning the Rawlings’ nineteen years rule to Kufuor’s government to the present, it is possible to discover a pattern of fraudulent claims brought against the government which were insufficiently defended and which finally led to the payments of very huge sums of money to certain people and entities. Thus a permanent commission should be set up as part of government’s auditing and regulatory system to investigate every judgment debt paid to anybody since independence to find out whether there has been a pattern of false claims and fraudulent payments. Going forward, such a commission should also have a preemptive function to investigate all outstanding claims against the government and bring into the public purview the defense posture assumed by the government in protecting the nation against these debts.
Now one curious aspect of the committee’s report is the claim against Nana Akufo Addo concerning the nineteen million dollar judgment debt payment in the matter of Societe-General v. The Government of Ghana in which a whole ship was sold by the Kufuor administration to defray a Gh¢19.5 million judgment debt owed to Societe-General Bank in 2001 when Nana Akufo-Addo was the Attorney General. The Judgment Debt Commission report concludes that Nana Addo’s “miserable” failure to defend the state in court led to the judgment debt being higher than what Ghana would have paid.
It is not due process that the NPP presidential candidate was not invited by the commission to explain how that inflated judgement debt claim got to be paid under his watch. But over nineteen million Ghana cedis judgment payment, if wrongfully done, is gargantuan under every circumstances, and so it will be naïve to leave the matter hanging as if enough defense has been adduced by merely stating that the man was not called to defend himself. It is my contention that whatever Nana knows of this whole business ought to be put into the public domain to clear the matter up: particularly the facts forming the basis of the claim, the negotiations that took place and the results, and more importantly, how the then Office of the Attorney General defended the suit and ended up paying the judgment award.
In the end, it may probably not be so much a question of whether or not a mistake has been made but whether prudent business judgment applied in the matter. This is because when we accuse any person of fraud, we do not assume that the person has not made a mistake, but rather whether that mistake is intentional, purposeful and willful and made with a clear view of causing financial loss and profiting thereby, such as in the case of Woyome. We do not live in a perfect system, but we must aspire to create a more perfect system by weaning ourselves off those self-serving behaviors that cast us out as per se corrupt. If perchance, any mistake was made even under Nana Akufo-Addo’s watch, there is no need to defend him and put up a perception of political collusion or blind support. The man has to be able to explain himself well and admit his mistake and show how that mistake came about. If he has not wrongfully benefitted from the outcome of his mistake, he may have caused financial loss all right but that loss cannot be put in the same category as those willful and capricious ones akin to that of the NDC government. So it is not enough defense for Nana Addo to state that he was not invited to explain himself; he should be able to put his explanation into the public domain now.
Regarding the NDC government’s judgment debt shenanigans, the majority leader, Mr. Alban Bagbin once imputed that Mr. Barton Oduro, the second Deputy Speaker of Ghana’s parliament, is psychologically disturbed over his role in the Woyome scandal. My response to his assertion is that “he ain’t seen nothing yet”. As I speak, only an infinitesimal bit of the astronomical fraud of the NDC government has been exposed so far. Much more still remains undisclosed dating as far back as in the days of the Rawlings’ PNDC era. And if we dig deeper into the quagmire, many are those in the present NDC government who will never sleep again. And remember that we are talking about a government which was supposed to have been founded on the principles of probity and accountability, and under whose watch many people were designated as corrupt, given some sort of kangaroo trial and shot or imprisoned. And if this government were not operating under some sort of a somnambulist spell, it would survey all of its corrupt practices and despair greatly. Or at least be very, very afraid.
But even when one listens to comments by the party’s founder, J.J. Rawlings and his wife, one gets the impression that these are people who live in their own detached reality and have emplaced on the body politic of Ghana a government that also lives in its own detached reality. Otherwise it is difficult to understand how a family that has collected four million dollar judgment debt from the government can even point accusing fingers at Woyome for defrauding the government. Kwaku Baako once described Rawlings as a walking contradiction. I cannot find a more apt description for the whole family as they wax lyrical about other people’s citizenship, their corruption and indiscipline and their qualification to hold any office in Ghana. This is because no matter what the Rawlingses say, they turn up indicting themselves first and foremost. And when you capture this essence of their contradiction, you can only project same on the government they have bequeathed to the people of Ghana.
And from this fake reality of the NDC government and its antecedents, we have been compelled to endure statements to the effect that our economy is growing in leaps and bounds, that our people have money to pay for their energy bills, that our power situation is not as bad as other African nations….Thus where the NDC government fails to perform creditably, it conjures its own dream of greater achievements and live within the bubble of its own phantasmagoric propaganda, seeing no evil of the evil it has created, nor hearing no complaints from the people it has burdened, nor saying nothing sensible to assuage the anger of the people it has offended.
And so here we are again, with a judgment debt report only partially documenting the gargantuan fraud that has been committed under the NDC watch and as part of its subterfuge, conflating the issue by a passing mention of Nana Akufo-Addo, a man they can never succeed in tagging as corrupt. But this will also pass.
As I have stated elsewhere, it seems that given the size and income of Ghana, we might as well be the foremost country in the world to waste the largest portion of our treasury paying off judgment debts. And if the present report is anything to go by, its value is that it has initiated a process that should be ongoing: looking back to retrieve whatever the nation has lost in judgement debts, looking into the present to see if we are still doing anything wrong that will cost the government more money in the future, and looking into the future to guarantee for our children a country in which corrupt judgment debts will never ever fly again.
Samuel Adjei Sarfo, J.D., is a trial lawyer in Austin, Texas, USA. You can email him at [email protected]