Ghana: Outrage At Law - Friday, Dec. 20, 1963

Dictator Kwame Nkrumah outdid himself last week. He not only flatly refused to free three political prisoners who had been acquitted by Ghana's highest court, but he summarily fired the judge who had presided over their trial.

The defendants, five in all, were charged with treason after Nkrumah was wounded in the shoulder by a bomb in an attempt on his life in August 1962.

The dictator's tame press had repeatedly condemned them in advance. But Chief Justice Sir Arku Korsah, who headed the three-man court, chose to ignore the hint. At the end of a 51-day trial, he convicted two of the accused, who will be hanged, but exonerated the three top officials who were charged with masterminding the conspiracy. Among the three: former Information Minister Tawia Adamafio, 51, a leftwing, London-educated lawyer who had once been Nkrumah's closest crony. The prosecution cited as "evidence" the fact that Adamafio had refused to sit beside the President on the day that he was to be killed and claimed that later, when Nkrumah lay on a hospital operating table, he had tried to engage him in "wearisome argument" in order, literally, to talk him to death.

Along with the other defendants—a former foreign minister and a leader of Nkrumah's ruling Convention People's Party—Adamafio was formally "discharged" by the court. But the trio was immediately bundled back into the cells. Interior Minister Kwaku Boateng cynically explained that their acquittal "was the sole responsibility of the judiciary, not of the government, which is therefore not bound to take any cognizance of it." They will remain in jail under a law that permits the government to detain any citizen for ten years without trial "in order to prevent him from acting in a manner prejudicial to Ghana's security."

Leaping to Nkrumah's defense, the Ghanaian Times recalled Franklin Roosevelt's 1937 attack on the U.S. Supreme Court, adding: "We cannot have a wig-and-gown cantata while Rome is burning. The nation cannot be bamboozled by the diabolic insinuations and aspersions of a confused and antagonistic judiciary." Nkrumah completed the outrage when, in violation of Ghana's constitution, he sacked Sir Arku Korsah, 69, a widely respected jurist who in 1956 became Ghana's first black Chief Justice. Noting that even South Africa's high-handed Prime Minister Hendrik Verwoerd has never interfered with the judiciary, a shocked British official said: "This is the Stalinist technique."

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