Editorial: Kpegah�s Sabre -Rattling Enterprise

When Betty Mould-Iddrisu eventually succumbs to the pressure being exerted on her and goes ahead to drag the so-called Kufuor officials to the courts on weak legal premises, we would have worsened our bad governance record. Not that the Attorney-General and Justice Minister is oblivious to the need to interrogate such cacophonous refrain of �jail them, they are corrupt� before turning to the courts, but under such intense pressure, she could end up capitulating without adequately doing so, especially since she also promised doing just that in the twilight of last year. The past week has been a disturbing one for the justice system in the country, with all manner of pressure being brought upon the Justice Minister. Perhaps, the most painful and amazing is the one from the lips of Justice Kpegah who has overnight joined the ranks of the cadres and therefore behaving as such. Justice Kpegah. The old man has given impetus to the adage that the educated African is the worst peddler of ethnicity as he is busily engaged in the destructive enterprise. As a former member of the bench, his political remarks in the past few weeks have been at variance with the position, laced with ethnocentricity, outright lies and robbing him of all traces of respect. For a man endowed with such a supposed wealth of legal savvy to throw out politically obscene expressions, like he did last week, is to push us to wonder whether the man is not on the verge of senility. If the Archers, Kweteys and others can confine themselves to the dustbin of dirty politics, Justice Kpegah should not, otherwise he would incur the opprobrium of many Ghanaians. He has already started doing so anyway. As for his comrades in political conspiracy, they must take note that equating a post-election shoe-string victory to a post-coup d��tat environment is to display ignorance of the features of the former. The post-coup feature of arresting politicians of the old order, detaining them and then releasing them afterwards is most foul and has no place in modern decent societies. If that is what those screaming their voices hoarse on radio stations seek to achieve, they should forget it because they won�t get it. Ghana has long passed that stage and even though our good governance record is under the threat of destruction, this destructive wish of the propagandists and ethnocentric characters like Kpegah would come to naught, yielding nothing but imperiling the country. We must not destroy this beautiful country through careless application of the law. It is our unalloyed position that whoever breaches the law must be dealt with accordingly. But in doing so, the time-tested means of adjudicating must be explored to the letter. The rule of law, we have said it time without number, should supersede the rule of men; this is one of the attributes of a politically civil society which we claim to be. With a Prof of law at the head of government, the last thing we can countenance is a breach of political civility such as dragging people before the court under shabbily-arranged evidence or even none at all. While we maintain our position that any politician who breaches the law must be dealt with, we dare warn that when criminal cases are given a political touch, they lose their import. In fact, in some cases, suspects are able to escape punishment because of the politicization of the subject. A tit-for-tat enactment to cloud the resuscitated Mabey & Johnson debacle, as the Commission for Human Rights and Administrative Justice (CHRAJ) begins work on the matter from today, is not in our best interest.