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‘Unashamed’ Akufo-Addo Determines Who Gets Prosecuted Under His Watch – Amidu
Former Special Prosecutor, Martin Amidu says President Akufo-Addo interferes in the work of the Auditor General by determining who should be prosecuted or not.
In an article, Amidu detailed how the President stopped the prosecution of some Members of Parliament on the Minority side, who were accused of taking double salaries, in exchange for their cooperation with his government in parliament.
According to Mr Amidu, although the then-Attorney General, Ms Gloria Akuffo and the Director of Public Prosecutions had both perused the case docket and had come to the conclusion that charges be filed against some of the lawmakers, the President ordered them to stop.
His article said: “This view is consistent with the clear unconstitutional usurpation of the independent exercise of prosecutorial discretion of the Attorney General by President Nana Akufo-Addo in his response to a question asked by Kweku Dawuro of Kingdom FM on the government’s fight against corruption on 13 December 2019, particularly the prosecution of the double salaries and other criminal cases. The President unconstitutionally assumed the status of the Attorney General of Ghana and shockingly said, inter alia, on the Members of Parliament double salary cases as follows:
‘…The double salary and members of parliament: it is not a straightforward allegation of misappropriation that some people think. There is a whole lot of double counting, to what extent people were taking money vis-a-vis the emolument of the article 70 and all that, and I am thinking that unless the thing is really clear-cut and, it has not been made quite clear to me, to rein a whole lot of parliamentarians – and the list is quite a lot – to rein a whole lot of parliamentarians on a fifty-fifty case; for myself, I don’t think that we will be doing the public interest of our country any service in that way. So, the process of seeing to what extent the set-off can be there is been ongoing; there is a group doing that work and when they finish, we’ll be in a position to let the country know what the final outcome of the double salary thing is…’”
According to him, President Akufo-Addo’s response at the media encounter was “unashamedly and publicly usurping an independent prosecutorial constitutional discretion of an Attorney General.”
He noted that the allusion by President Akufo-Addo to a group performing the constitutional duties of the Attorney General to enable him to decide, and “be in a position to let the country know what the final outcome of the double salary thing is…” shows “beyond every reasonable doubt the interfering role of President Akufo-Addo in the administration of criminal justice in deciding who must or must not be prosecuted for a crime and not the Attorney General”.
In Mr Amidu’s view, “the Attorney General regrettably became a poodle of the President by ceding his or her constitutional prosecutorial mandate to the usurping President”.
