John Mahama
Former President John Dramani Mahama has launched a blistering attack on the judiciary, saying that the image of the country’s judiciary has badly deteriorated that Ghanaians openly make mockery of the justice system and of the justices.
He stated, “If people are not poking fun about politics and inducement being used to sway the hand of justice in the Lower Courts, then it is poking fun and making statements about the 7:0 of the unanimous FC, verdicts which mostly involve cases of a political nature in our Supreme Court. This is an unfortunate but serious development.”
Petition
Mr. Mahama, who was the 2020 NDC presidential candidate, was bounced unanimously by the seven-member panel of the Supreme Court, when he petitioned the apex court over the outcome of the election.
The court said Mr. Mahama and the NDC failed to adduce evidence to back their claims that no candidate crossed the 50% plus one vote needed for the Electoral Commission (EC) to declare a winner.
At the time the case was being heard, the NDC’s stance that Mr. Mahama was denied victory had shifted to the argument that none of the 12 candidates that participated in the 2020 Presidential Election got the constitutionally mandatory 50% plus one of the total valid votes.
The NDC also pushed that the Supreme Court should determine whether the Electoral Commission (EC) had to organise a run-off election between Mr. Mahama as petitioner and President Akufo-Addo, who was declared winner by the EC on December 9, 2020 after the crucial December 7, 2020 general election, but the court bounced them.
Since the Supreme Court sent him packing after his unsuccessful challenge, Mr. Mahama has not forgiven the EC and judiciary, attacking the two state institutions on every available platform.
NDC Forum
Speaking at the opening of the 2nd Annual Lawyers Conference of the opposition National Democratic Congress (NDC) over the weekend, ex-President Mahama said, “Recently, so badly has the image of our judiciary deteriorated that many of our citizenry openly make mockery of our justice system and of our justices.”
“The phrase ‘go to court’ is these days met with derisive laughter instead of hope that one will truly get justice if he went to the court,” he asserted.
Ex-President Mahama, who is nursing hope to lead the NDC in 2024, said there is the urgent need for the judiciary to work to win the trust and confidence of the citizenry.
For him, this will help erase the “widely-held perception of hostility and political bias in legal proceedings at the highest court of the land.”
“Unfortunately, we have no hope that the current leadership of our judiciary can lead such a process of change, we can only hope that the new Chief Justice will lead the process to repair the broken image that our judiciary has acquired over the last few years,” he posited.
Mr. Mahama continued, “One of the scariest existential threats to any democracy is when citizens think their judiciary holds no value for them or no use to them, this is the security threat that the National Security apparatus tried to draw the attention of the nation to recently but was poorly received by the President and his party.”
“It is scary because it threatens the peace and stability of our democracy and we must quickly correct this fast spreading notion,” he stated.
He argued, “If care is not taken, we will get to a state where people will have no qualms about taking the law into their own hands because they do not have the confidence that they can get any justice in the system.”
By Ernest Kofi Adu