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Two lawyers, Messrs Egbert Isaac Faibille and Ernest Kofi Abotsi, last Thursday mounted a platform to engage in a stimulating intellectual discourse on the motion, �Ghana�s Judgement Debt Commission is a Waste of Public Resources�. Speaking for the motion, Mr Faibille, of Faibille and Faibille Law Firm, described the commission�s work as a �needless waste of public resources� while his opponent, Mr Abotsi, the Dean of the GIMPA School of Law, maintained that the commission essentially was using �less money to chase more money.� The Judgement Debt Commission was set up by President John Mahama under Constitutional Instrument (CI) 79 in November 2012 to enquire about the payment of judgement debts in the country. Faibille�s take Stressing his point, Mr Faibille argued that the setting up of the commission was cosmetic and a waste of time and public resources because the answers that the commission sought to find were common. He averred that historically, commissions had been set up with a hidden agenda to witch-hunt political opponents, stressing that other state institutions such as the Police, the Bureau of National Investigations (BNI) and the Economic and Organised Crime Office (EOCO) could have done a better job. Mr Faibille cited the setting up of the Kwame Nkrumah Asset Commission, saying that the commission was used as a tool to denigrate the first President who, at the time, could not appear before the commission. Beyond this, he said, was the example of Dr Charles Wereko Brobbey and Mr Kwadwo Mpiani against whom adverse findings were made by a commission of enquiry for their roles in the Ghana@50 celebrations. He said when they went to the appellate court, they succeeded in absolving themselves of any wrong doing, thereby setting a precedent that rendered the outcome of such commissions of enquiry ineffective in their bid to do a restitution. Mr Faibille was emphatic that if the commission�s resolve was to retrieve monies that had been paid as far back as the genesis of Ghana�s democratic dispensation in 1992, then its work was a �much ado about nothing� and a �charade�. Abotsi�s thrust Mr Abotsi, on the other hand, said the issue of judgement debt was a matter of intense public interest which necessitated the President setting up the commission. For him, the commission constituted a �feedback mechanism� to the government and those at the helm of national affairs to make changes to the country�s policies. Mr Abotsi contended that there had been instances of questionable judgement debts arising out of poor legal representation on the part of the state which had constituted a drain on national resources. For which reason, he said, it was prudent to enquire about the causes so as to take pre-emptive steps to forestall their occurrence in the future. While conceding that commissions of enquiry in the past had sought to hound political targets, he did not see the need to totally dispense with them, but rather focus on their inherent quality.