By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.
I am actually beginning to like this pathetic cognitive basket-case called Johnson Asiedu-Nketia. In the latest of his characteristic comedic bouts, the general-secretary of the National Democratic Congress (NDC) claims that he lasted only one day in the witness-box with Mr. Philip Addison, counsel for Nana Akufo-Addo and the NPP petitioners, because so superbly had the garrulous NDC chief-scribe performed that Mr. Addison had almost immediately hit a brick wall in his cross-examination of Mr. Asiedu-Nketia (See "I Was Too Hot For Addison To Handle In Court" JoyOnline.com/Ghanaweb.com 6/7/13).
Of course, the facile assumption here is that the longer a witness lasts in the witness-box, the less difficult it must have been for the cross-examining counsel of the opposing party. Nothing could be farther from the truth. For in reality, the diametrically opposite is often the case; for instance, Dr. Mahamudu Bawumia, the second petitioner and star-witness of the Election 2012 petitioners, spent about two weeks in the witness-box because the Oxbridge-educated and internationally renowned economist clearly appears to have been a rather too tough a nut for Mr. Tsatsu "The Thief" Tsikata to crack.
And to be certain, so frustrating had the former Deputy-Governor of the Bank of Ghana made matters for the NDC respondents that even Justice William Atuguba, a well-known ideological partisan of the National Democratic Congress, could not help but impatiently complain that Dr. Bawumia was making matters too hectic for the NDC legal wiz-kid by his deliberately convoluted answers to questions repeatedly posed him by the first convicted felon in postcolonial Ghanaian history to practice law before the country's august Supreme Court.
In the case of Mr. Asiedu-Nketia, the petitioners' attorney manage to readily stump him in a classical perjury fashion within a couple of hours of the NDC scribe's mounting the witness-box. And this was done in the most fundamental manner, by simply replaying the digitized recorded voice of the obstreperously talkative Mr. Asiedu-Nketia to the witness, who almost immediately contradicted himself and effectively mangled his own credibility by sheepishly confessing to the same.
At any rate, two legally grievous incidents have occurred against the balance sheets of the respondents which Mr. Asiedu-Nketia and his supporters ought to be feverishly worrying themselves about. And this is, of course, the fact that both the NDC scribe and Dr. Kwadwo Afari-Gyan, Ghana's Electoral Commissioner, perjured themselves on the witness stand. In other words, both the second and third respondents took a solemn oath to tell the truth, and nothing but the unvarnished truth, and then like the congenital and pathological liars that they well appear to be, went right ahead and did exactly what they had sworn not to do!
In any democratically functional and robust and civilized political culture, both Messrs. Afari-Gyan and Asiedu-Nketia would be facing stiff and long prison jail terms. In Ghana, where high court judges have been summarily abducted and savagely assassinated, Mafia-style, under the cover of darkness on purely ethnic and ideological grounds by a government pontifically claiming to be about the laudable business of "probity and accountability," the judicial sanction for perjury quizzically appears to be one of simply having brazen perjurers like Mr. Asiedu-Nketia thumb their noses at the Supreme Court.
Is this the Ghana in which I was born and raised? What a country "in which we live in it," Uncle Atukwei!
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*Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.
Department of English
Nassau Community College of SUNY
Garden City, New York
June 7, 2013
E-mail: [email protected]
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