The New Patriotic Party (NPP) has told Chief Justice Paul Baffoe Bonnie that a Judiciary that vows loyalty to a President’s agenda is no Judiciary at all; it is a third chamber of Jubilee House, distinguished only by its robes.
The NPP said this when they criticised the Chief Justice for his visits to some state-owned enterprises (SOEs) and the commentary he made.
The Chief Justice praised the performance of Minerals Income Investment Fund MIIF and other public institutions under the current administration.
During a visit to MIIF earlier in the day, Justice Baffoe-Bonnie said some of the developments he had witnessed at state institutions had left him wondering what Ghana had been doing over the past eight years.
The Chief Justice said his earlier visit to SSNIT had also reinforced his impression that some public institutions were performing significantly better.
Reacting to this in a statement signed by its General Secretary, Justin Kodua Frimpong, the NPP said “The Chief Justice’s words and conduct lend chilling credence to the widespread concern that the leadership of the Judiciary is coordinating with Jubilee House. By word and by deed, he has shut the door of justice against every Ghanaian who declines to sing from the President’s hymn sheet and has willed and surrendered the Judiciary to the President and his agenda men.
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“A Judiciary that vows loyalty to a President’s agenda is no Judiciary at all; it is a third chamber of Jubilee House, distinguished only by its robes. We cannot overlook the ironical part of all these developments: that several courts and offices of the Judiciary lie in disarray: courtrooms crumbling, registries overwhelmed and staff labouring under conditions that directly affect justice delivery. He has not visited a single one of these ailing courts to assess their deplorable state, nor raised his voice for their retooling and refurbishment. He has instead metamorphosed into the monitoring and evaluation officer of the Executive, abandoning his own collapsing house to tour the state agencies of the government for purposes known only to God.”
Below is the NPP’s full statement…
The New Patriotic Party (NPP) has taken note, with profound shock and disgust, of a video circulating publicly in which the Chief Justice of the Republic of Ghana descends from the sacred heights of the Bench into the trenches of partisan politics, offering comparative political commentary to the effect that the current NDC government and its appointed CEOs are performing better than the eight years of the previous NPP administration.
Let it be stated plainly: this is not the language of a Chief Justice. It is the language of a party propagandist, of a kind exclusively reserved for NDC communicators and serial callers, and it has no place whatsoever in the mouth of the head of Ghana’s Judiciary.
The Constitution of the Fourth Republic, in Articles 125 and 127, establishes the Judiciary as an independent arm of government, subject to neither the control nor the direction of any person or authority, and the judicial oath binds the Chief Justice above all to do justice to all manner of persons without fear or favour, affection or ill will. Regrettably, this video is no isolated lapse.
It is the culmination of a pattern the nation has observed with mounting alarm. Long before this pronouncement, the Chief Justice had made himself a familiar presence at the functions of political appointees of this government. A Chief Justice who travels and celebrates as a courtier of the Executive cannot thereafter sit as a neutral umpire in cases to which the Executive is a party. He has presented himself not as the impartial head of an independent Judiciary but as a leading member of the National Democratic Congress in judicial robes, and if political commentary is his true vocation, he should resign forthwith and formally take up membership of the NDC, where such contributions are handsomely rewarded.
The NPP jokes not with his declared vow that everything must be done to ensure that the agenda of the President succeeds. Which agenda, My Lord? The President’s declared agenda includes Operation Recover All Loot (ORAL), under which persons associated with the NPP are being arraigned before the very courts over which he presides.
When the head of the Judiciary pledges his exertions to the success of the Executive’s agenda, what conclusion is an accused person standing in the dock, or indeed any citizen, to draw? A Chief Justice swears a single oath, and it is to the Constitution: to no President, no party and no agenda.
The day he does otherwise, he ceases to be a judge and becomes an instrument of the very power he was appointed to check. We have already observed the extraordinary alacrity with which vacation warrants have been issued in special political cases involving members of the NPP. The incarceration of Chairman Wontumi is evidence enough: justice in this Republic now proceeds at two speeds, remarkable haste for opponents of the government and serene leisure for its friends. In the considered view of the NPP, this is the agenda at work, the judicial machinery by which the President’s wish to see persons associated with the NPP imprisoned is being brought to pass.
The Chief Justice’s words and conduct lend chilling credence to the widespread concern that the leadership of the Judiciary is coordinating with Jubilee House. By word and by deed, he has shut the door of justice against every Ghanaian who declines to sing from the President’s hymn sheet and has willed and surrendered the Judiciary to the President and his agenda men.
A Judiciary that vows loyalty to a President’s agenda is no Judiciary at all; it is a third chamber of Jubilee House, distinguished only by its robes. We cannot overlook the ironical part of all these developments: that several courts and offices of the Judiciary lie in disarray: courtrooms crumbling, registries overwhelmed and staff labouring under conditions that directly affect justice delivery. He has not visited a single one of these ailing courts to assess their deplorable state, nor raised his voice for their retooling and refurbishment. He has instead metamorphosed into the monitoring and evaluation officer of the Executive, abandoning his own collapsing house to tour the state agencies of the government for purposes known only to God.
With respect, My Lord, the leaking roofs are in your courts, not in the ministries. He has delivered no reforms to improve justice delivery and no relief for the litigant strangled by delay; his one visible programme has been the hatchet job of targeting opposition voices. A Chief Justice whose legacy is persecution rather than reform has forfeited every claim to the confidence of the nation. The NPP hereby serves notice that it will in due course convene a major press conference at which the full record of the Chief Justice’s appalling conduct will be laid before the nation in unsparing detail.
The Judiciary belongs neither to the President, nor to the NDC, nor to the Chief Justice; it belongs to the people of Ghana, who are entitled under the Constitution to courts that are blind to politics. 2 We therefore demand that the Chief Justice immediately and unreservedly retract his partisan commentary and his vow of loyalty to the President’s agenda or, failing that, resign forthwith and formally join the NDC, whose cause he has chosen to champion from the Bench and that the President immediately fill the Council of State vacancy and publicly disavow any arrangement touching the Chief Justice’s post-retirement future.
The courtroom is the last refuge of the ordinary Ghanaian, and the NPP will resist its conversion into an instrument of political persecution with every lawful means at our disposal. History will record who stood where when the independence of Ghana’s courts was put to the test. God bless our homeland Ghana and make our nation great and strong.
