Mahama’s second coming has created a strange, quiet tension in the country. People pretend everything is normal, but it is not. Everyone can feel the ground shifting. What unsettles many is not the drama of today, but the knowledge that once a precedent is set in Ghana, it never dies. It waits. It comes back. It bites the next group in line.
First, take the bail crisis. Former National Service boss Osei Asibey Antwi sits in police custody because a court demanded he secure properties worth eight hundred million (GHS 800,000,000.00) Ghana cedis before he could be released. He has not been convicted. Under Article 19(2)(c) of the Constitution, he is presumed innocent until proven guilty. Yet he is behind bars. Osei Asdibey Antwi is not alone in this pre-trial political-persecution. Wontumi has gone through it and still wallowing in it. Kwabena Adu Boahene has been taken through this path and still in it. Just name them but only Mahama’s political opponents.
When EOCO defends these heavy bail regimes, they claim nothing new is happening. They say Mahama’s government is simply applying established logic. But whose logic? EOCO boss, Raymond Archer justifies the ‘kakai’ bail bonds, arguing that “high bail conditions always match the scale of financial crimes and are central to assets recovery strategy.”
But what this justification forgets is that in applying it, they are not just establishing a monstrous precedent – they are ratifying a new normal for tomorrow’s criminal justice. They are expanding its boundaries. They are making the extreme a routine, and in doing so, they hand the next NPP government a manual.
That is how a bad precedent becomes normal. That is how every government arms the next one.
Second, consider the mass dismissals. People who had been properly hired under the previous NPP administration found themselves stripped of their livelihoods the moment the NDC took over in January 2025. Those interviewed, vetted, and appointed through the state machinery were suddenly made to feel like trespassers. Dismissals became a tool of political cleansing, and everyone knew what it meant: if one side uses it, the other will not forget.
Third, the judiciary absorbed the sharpest blow. Chief Justice Gertrude Torkornoo was removed, and Justice Baffoe-Bonnie was sworn in as the new head of the judiciary. There is no ambiguity here. No speculation. It happened.
On paper, a process was followed. In reality, it was a political removal – motivated not by constitutional cause, but by a desire for control. A desire to manipulate the constitution. A desire to remove the EC Chairperson and her deputies. A naked political desire to suborn state institutions. A desire to do many bad things to political opponents and Ghana! A desire to rape the constitution and seek a third term mandate
The process was flawed because its purpose was flawed. Its purpose was to bend the judiciary, not to uphold it.
A country that once treated the judiciary as a steady pillar now watches that pillar being dragged into the day-to-day storms of partisan power. When this wheel turns again, nothing will stop another administration from doing the same. Ghanaians are not naïve. They know that reciprocity has become our political culture.
State institutions are bending under pressure. People who once claimed to defend the rule of law – CSOs, the clergy – now clap as institutions behave like an extension of the President Mahama’s personal property. They justify police excesses publicly and without shame. They defend selective prosecutions. They pretend each step is harmless, forgetting that once you teach a system to break the rules, it never again remembers how to follow them.
The saddest part is that the men cheering loudest today will be gone when the consequences arrive. John Mahama will be gone. The Asiedu Nketiahs will be gone. Dominic Ayine will be too frail to remember anything. They are nearing the end. They will retire comfortably into books, consultancies, or quiet, bedridden retirement, while a new generation – especially the young ones in the NDC who are ignorantly cheering the excesses today – will inherit the backlash. They will carry the weight of decisions they never made.
Consider Yaw, Nkrumah, 19, a first-year Law student at the University of Ghana. He runs the NDC’s social media for his hall. He believes in justice, accountability, and his party as the vehicle for it. He cheered the high bail bond slapped on Osei Asibey Antwi, posting a fiery tweet about ‘accountability finally here.’ He defended the removal of the Chief Justice as ‘cleansing the judiciary.’
Yaw aims to join the Attorney-General’s department after law school, around 2031. He does not know it yet, but the legal precedent being cemented today – that bail is a tool for pre-trial punishment – will be the very tool used to keep his future boss, an NDC appointee, in cells without trial in 2034. The precedent that a Chief Justice can be removed without cause, and without fidelity to due process will be the weapon used tomorrow against a judge his generation admires. The institutional mistrust being sown now will be the climate in which he will strive to build a career. The retaliation he applauds in pixelated victory today will be the professional reality he will navigate tomorrow.
The political veterans who are orchestrating these moves will not be in those cells. They will not be in that demoralized department. Yaw will be here. He is trading a moment’s catharsis for a lifetime of navigating the ruined landscape his NDC leadership left him.
And the wheel of administration will turn. Maybe in 2028. Maybe in 2032. But it will turn. A new administration will walk into Jubilee House with a long list of memories – the dismissals, the harsh bail bonds, the vacant seat of Chief Justice Torkornoo. Ghana always swings. Sometimes slowly, sometimes unexpectedly, but it swings. The future staffers, youth organizers, appointees, and ordinary supporters of tomorrow’s NDC will face the very machinery their elders helped shape. They will not face it because the next government is more wicked, but because the rules of engagement have been rewritten.
The story is simple. Every political act becomes a seed. You cannot choose when it will grow or who will harvest it. You only know that it always grows. The people who will pay the full price are the ones still in school today, the ones entering politics with hope, the ones who believed their leaders would think about the long run.
Ghana’s problem is not that one party is wicked and the other is righteous. The problem is that every side believes it will never fall from power. The country moves forward only when both sides remember they always do.
J. A. Sarbah
