The Africa Centre for Security and Counterterrorism (ACSC) has observed with concern the manner in which two unrelated judicial developments this week are being received in our public discourse.
In one, a United States immigration judge found the evidence submitted by Ghana’s Office of the Special Prosecutor against former Finance Minister Ken Ofori-Atta unpersuasive.
In the other, the High Court in Accra convicted New Patriotic Party Ashanti Regional Chairman Bernard Antwi-Boasiako and Akonta Mining Limited under the Minerals and Mining Act, 2006 (Act 703), and imposed a twenty-year custodial sentence.
What troubles ACSC is not either ruling on its own terms. It is the pattern of reception. Each camp is celebrating the outcome that favours it and condemning the one that does not, applying a single, corrosive test to the administration of justice: not “was this decided lawfully?” but “did it go my way?”
A country that judges its courts by that standard is no longer maintaining a justice system. It is keeping a scoreboard. And a nation that treats its courts as a scoreboard will, in time, find that it has no courts at all.
On the Ofori-Atta immigration ruling
ACSC wishes to state plainly what the ruling of 15 June 2026 is, and what it is not. An immigration court is not a criminal court. Judge David Gardey was not asked to determine Mr Ofori-Atta’s guilt.
He was asked whether to grant discretion ary immigration relief, and he weighed the Office of the Special Prosecutor’s affidavit among several factors, including the applicant’s personal and medical circumstances.
The ruling is therefore not an acquittal; it does not extinguish the charges pending under Ghanaian law, nor does it bar prosecution in a Ghanaian court. On that narrow legal point, the Office of the Special Prosecutor is correct.
Nevertheless, ACSC urges the Office of the Special Prosecutor to treat this as a sobering institutional moment rather than a technicality to be dismissed.
That a foreign tribunal reviewed a Ghanaian State agency’s file and found it wanting carries real costs: it weakens future extradition and mutual legal assistance requests, it hands every accused person a ready-made shield, and it risks converting a corruption case into a narrative of persecution.
Prosecutorial credibility is a finite national asset. The lesson is not to prosecute less, but to charge later, prove harder, and take the SML matter to a Ghanaian courtroom, where alone it can be resolved.
On the Wontumi sentence
ACSC recognises that the Minority Caucus has raised arguable objections, among them the delivery of judgment in the absence of lead counsel, the refusal to refer questions of constitutional interpretation to the Supreme Court, and the piercing of Akonta Mining’s corporate veil to found personal liability.
These are legitimate grounds. They are also, precisely, grounds of appeal. The Caucus has announced that it will pursue the matter before the Court of Appeal and the Supreme Court. That is the system functioning exactly as our Constitution intends, and ACSC welcomes it.
ACSC parts company with the Minority on two points, however. First, the claim of “selective justice” does not answer whether an offence was committed at Samreboi; it merely alleges that others should also be charged.
Where that allegation is true, the remedy is to charge those others, not to release the person already convicted. Under-prosecution is never cured by de-prosecution, and any doctrine holding that no one may be convicted until everyone is convicted amounts to a permanent amnesty for the powerful.
Second, the language of the “political prisoner” is inaccurate and dangerous. A person convicted after a contested trial, with a full and already-invoked right of appeal, is a convict with an appeal pending.
He is not a prisoner of conscience, and the two must never be conflated, least of all by a Minority in Parliament of a country the region regards as a democratic anchor.
On political parties and collateral damage
ACSC counsels all political parties to distinguish carefully between defending a member’s right to a fair trial and adopting a member’s conduct as party doctrine.
The first is principled; the second transfers the individual’s liability onto the entire organisation. A party cannot credibly campaign against galamsey in one season while mobilising to overturn a galamsey conviction in another.
Galamsey is not an abstraction in this country; it is poisoned water from a household tap, a farm that will not yield, a river a community can no longer drink from, and, increasingly, a driver of land disputes and youth grievances. Parties that place themselves between the public and a galamsey verdict inflict collateral damage on themselves that no press conference can repair.
On the deeper question
Some now openly ask whether democracy is good for Africa. ACSC’s answer is unequivocal: yes, and the events of this week are the proof, not the refutation.
A politically powerful opposition figure was tried in open court, represented by counsel, sentenced, and permitted to appeal; his party held a press conference to denounce the judge; and civil society is free to criticise the State’s own prosecutor in public.
In much of our immediate neighbourhood, at least some of those freedoms are today unthinkable. Democracy does not fail in West Africa from an excess of voting. It is hollowed out by elite non-compliance with lawful outcomes, by verdicts recast as persecution and courts delegitimised in advance.
Every leader who tells the public that the courts are bought lowers the cost of the next unconstitutional intervention.
An appeal is not what a citizen does when the system fails. An appeal is what a constitutional order offers instead of the street and the barracks.
ACSC therefore calls on all actors, the Office of the Special Prosecutor, the political parties, and every commentator in the public square, to route their grievances through the courts rather than around them.
Ken Ofori-Atta must answer to a Ghanaian court, not a foreign immigration file. Chairman Wontumi must answer to the Court of Appeal, not a press conference.
And the rest of us must protect the independence of the bench that will hear them both, because it in is the last institution standing between a disagreement and a catastrophe.
Democracy is not judged by how gracefully we win. It is judged by how lawfully we lose.
Signed,
Emmanuel Mawanye Kotin
Executive Director
