Clamour for militant fight against corruption or misplaced love for revolution?
The other day at his press interaction in the Flagstaff House, President John Mahama sent those present laughing when he definitely distanced himself and his government from emulating the unending crusade against corruption in our society by the standards of the peremptory, harsh, inhuman methods rife in this very country during the periods of military rule. At such regrettable times, one accused of corruption is never presumed innocent as the law requires, and as required in periods of constitutional rule, but deemed to be guilty of horrendous crimes of corruption, all fed by copious, colourful rumours of the theft of public resources.
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This was the scenario when human rights as marked as the right to fair trial, the right to self-defence and other rights common during democratic periods, were all denied the accused, and convictions were thus easily secured, all to prove the rank corruption inherent in the previous regime which must be punished come what may. It is in such a frenzied atmosphere akin to the Salem, Massachusetts witch-hunts in the 1600s in America that popular justice is deemed to have been satisfied, and the reason for the ouster of the previous regime justified.
Apollo 568
Except there are serious exceptions to this reading of our history and the unending struggle to fight corruption, which negates what I have said. In civilian regimes marked by constitutions and the whole panoply of the rule of law, such wanton display of state power to the detriment of people wrongly accused has also occurred, albeit shrouded in pious legalistic constitutional claims but ultimately futile protestations. Thus Apollo 568 in 1970 in the Busia regime and the conviction of NDC government functionaries in the time of President Kufuor.
In Apollo 568 in 1970, Ghanaians working in the public and civil services who were suspected of corruption and other crimes against the public weal and the public purse were summarily retired or dismissed from the public and civil services in a so-called crusade against corruption in public life. In actual fact, this whole matter was provoked by ruling Progress Party faithful who wanted the jobs to be declared vacant as those removed left office. Not a single person was put before the courts of this country to prove the corruption claims of the Busia regime, hence the Sallah case. But all is now history.
Trials
In the more recent case of the Kufuor presidency, the claims of corruption had to be justified taking stock of the campaign which brought the government to power. Thus the lurid, highly propagandist trials of ministers and officials in the President Rawlings regime in the courts of this country. To take just one example of the abject manipulation of the justice system to prove this political point, the time frames in which Tsatsu Tsikata was alleged to have committed his crimes were changed several times in the course of the trial, just to nail him to the crime and fit it at the time the laws broken were extant. Of course, the lessons of 1970 had been well imbibed; because one of the reasons then Colonel Acheampong cited for his overthrow of the regime was the unfair, illegal nature of Apollo 568 exemplified in the Sallah case and its aftermath.
But to prove beyond doubt that the fight against corruption is a difficult hot pan to handle, President Kufuor pardoned all those who had been tried and convicted by his regime’s attack on corruption, and all of whom just happened, rather conveniently, to be members of the previous regime. The justification for this shocking U-turn was the need for national reconciliation as the new government of President Mills was due to take over a day after the pardons and releases from lawful incarceration. Never mind that the same government had established a National Reconciliation Committee to achieve the same purpose of reconciling Ghanaians earlier in the life of his government!
Justifying the unconditional pardons
This single action of a general, unconditional pardon for all those his government had claimed were corrupt was, therefore, a complete sham to cover up the wanton abuse of the rule of law and constitutionalism in which these persecutions were clothed. Because up to today as I write, no one in this country and beyond has been able to justify the pardons and, therefore, the trials and convictions which led to them.
I am on record in this column for disagreeing with President Obama when he said our continent did not need strong leaders, but strong institutions. In my opinion, I argued that you could not build strong institutions with weak leaders and that, therefore, his argument was wrong and misplaced. This is very clear in the fight against corruption in a country which has experienced all kinds of government led by different types of strong men. The ordinary thoroughly corrupt Ghanaian who has felt the rigours of the fight against corruption will say, sagely, with the advantage of the rich Ghanaian experience, that no matter how hot the soup boils, it will cool down one day, to wit, the fight would lose steam and the old habits will return with a vengeance.
The way to build enduring antidotes to corruption in the public sphere is constant, unremitting, brick-by-brick approach to strengthening relevant capacity to fight the canker, even in constitutional dispensations, especially when some of our lawyers, have made fortunes out of judgement debts arising from unlawful terminations and convictions. I am convinced that this is the way of the current government, and not highly propagandised attempts which falter at the end, courtesy of our enduring love for the rule of law. If it must be done, then, that fight must be fought well, and then the results will stand the test of time, and our prevailing passions, and not the dictates of fashionable sheer malice.
aburaepistle@hotmail.com