Comment
Unpopular Justice
The biggest collection of sycophants are still only human and for people who have been endowed with such limitless powers and who have been told that they dispense better quality justice than the traditional courts were bound at one time either to believe that they are supermen or else exhibit their inadequacies.
There is this quaint notion that the courts as they have been known by all in West Africa are not good enough to try people and special tribunals have to be set up unen- cumbered by what are called "legal technicalities".
Flight-Lieutenant Rawlings has not been swayed by arguments that it is essential for laws to be specific for the protection of all citizens so that people do not fall victim to the whims and caprices of officialdom. Popular justice, he has insisted, is what the people want and that is what he will give them.
He has boasted on occasion that there were many people who had cases before the regular courts and who wanted their cases to be transferred to the public tribunal.
The crunch came for the Public Tribunals when the chairman of the Ashanti Region Tribunal was hauled before the Accra Tribunal charged with corruption. He was acquitted and discharged because the Tribunal said it did not believe the testimony of the man who said he gave the money to him. That did not worry the people. But the Tribunal also accepted the accused person's explanation that the state's money he had been charged with misappropriating, he had used intending to pay back one day.
'The Mirror' found that a little hard to take and said so. Some people have, after all, been executed in Ghana for less.
What drew public disapproval from Flt-Lt. Rawlings himself was the case of the man who was recently acquitted on a charge of murdering a petrol pump attendant.
According to the Tribunal, the accused man was not guilty because when he picked up his friend's gun from a car seat and aimed at the pump attendant, he did not know nor fully appreciate the mechanism of the gun. In other words, the Tribunal was satisfied that the 36-year-old man did not know that shooting a man with a loaded submachine gun can hurt, let alone kill.
The explanation, of course, lay in the fact that the Tribunal felt and said that seeing that the petrol attendant had been selling petrol above the controlled price and was running away when he was shot dead, he deserved his fate. The Public Tribunal could not see itself convicting somebody who had only rid Ghanaian society of the type of person that the revolution aims at eliminating, that is, a profiteer.
Flt-Lt. Rawlings has been reported outraged by this particular verdict and has said so quite clearly asking for the trial records and throwing the worst invective possible at the Tribunals - they are becoming like the regular courts!
But then that is precisely what the Tribunals cannot be and it is to avoid such bizarre and eccentric verdicts that it is safer for all to be guided and ruled by clearly laid down laws.
Since the inception of these Tribunals they have dispensed justice according to what they think the mood of the country is and what they think will be helpful to the revolution. When they misread the mood of the country their verdicts will be unpopular or when the PNDC loses touch with the public sentiment, the verdicts from the Tribunals will seem out of gear.
Whichever way, the fate of those who are brought before the Tribunals is determined on basis that have nothing to do with their alleged crimes.
The members of the Public Tribunals must be quite dismayed and feeling betrayed. They must have reckoned that finding a chairman of a Tribunal guilty of corruption and misappropriation of public funds would be betraying the revolution - after all the only people who are supposed to be corrupt and spend public funds are the "corrupt politicians" not a revolutionary, and since the "corrupt politicians and lawyers" are supposed to be infiltrating the ranks of the faithful, they must have felt called upon to protect their own kind.
Now that the Inspector General of Police has confirmed that the miserable accused person has been re-arrested after his acquittal by the Tribunal on the say so of the Leader of the Revolution, it will be interesting to see whether he is going to be retried by another public Tribunal which would then return a verdict that would be pleasing to Flt-Lt. Rawlings.
This, of course, is not the first time that the judiciary (if the Public Tribunals can be called that) have displeased the executive in any country. The significant part of this is that the Tribunals had been established precisely to avoid this type of occurrence.
The Tribunal spokesmen have stated over and over again that they are not manipulated by the PNDC nor conduct the cases before them to suit the political goals of the PNDC and it will be interesting to see how they cope with the accusation being levelled against them.
