MR ATTORNEY-GENERAL, THIS IS NOT GOOD ENOUGH

This article was posted by Cameron Duodu,a Freelance Journalist in London in the Ghanaian Times of Ghana when he commended this journalist(William Yaw Owusu) for doing good journalism




If you had gone to the website of Joy FM on 20 November 2006 , to check up on the Ghana news posted there, you would have read the following:

“Missing cocaine case - Alhaji Moro, three others discharged
[Posted: Nov 17 2006 ] An Accra Regional Tribunal chaired by Mr Justice Frank Manu on Friday discharged Alhaji Moro and three other suspects, who had been held in connection with the missing 76 parcels of cocaine from MV Benjamin.
The Prosecution entered a nolle prosequi, as the Attorney General (AG) (sic) said it would not continue with the prosecution of the case against the accused persons.

"The state intends that the proceedings against Alhaji Moro, a businessman, Joseph Kojo Dawson, a businessman, Freeman Sosi, a fisherman and a canoe owner, and Evans Charwetey Tsekobi, an auto mechanic, should not continue," Ms Gertrude Aikins, Chief State Attorney, told the court. For now, as far as this case is concerned, the AG is letting them off the hook," she said.

“The Tribunal heeded the decision and discharged all the four accused persons accordingly. The four accused persons were not in court but their counsel represented them. –GNA”.

Now, the Ghana News Agency, to which this report was attributed by Joy FM, is a very experienced organisation. It’s had its ups and downs in the past, but by and large, it is reliable as to facts. So you would be justified, if you read the report just quoted, in concluding that “all the four accused persons’’ in the cocaine case had indeed been set free, and at the instance of the Attorney-General’s office.

But if you are inquisitive by nature, there would have been something about the report that wouldn’t have seemed quite right. How could the AG’s department withdraw the charges against the accused persons, just like that? No explanation; no announcement regarding any further action? And you would have said, “I can’t believe this! You mean they have been let off, after all the incriminatory evidence heard on the tape?”

And then if you were politically inclined, you would immediately have begun to speculate on the reasons for the Government withdrawing the charges: “Some top people are involved in the case, so the Government doesn’t want these chaps to give evidence in case they implicate those top people.” Or, even worse, you might have thought, “Well, 77 parcels of cocaine can bring in a hell of a lot of money. Figures like $235 million have been mentioned. How much are people paid in this country to be able to resist accepting an offer of even a small percentage of such a huge amount?”

Indeed, some of these speculations are not imaginary, but have actually appeared in print. Yet, if you allow your inquisitive mind to work and you probe further, you will find, on the website of The Ghanaian Times, that the report on the Joy FM site is not the full story. For, the paper, having reported the withdrawal of the charges against the four persons, added this crucial sentence: “But in a dramatic development, they were immediately re-arrested, on the orders of the AG. The four, who were not in court, were to have been freed from prison
custody after the discharge but following the orders of the AG, they were not released.” The paper also made its own enquiries and came up with another telling statement: Sources at the AG's department say they will be put before the Fast Track High Court to face fresh charges.”

Now, this is what is called good reporting. It answers the questions the reader wants answered. And it immediately dismisses the speculations that the politically-minded would have been throwing about wildly.

One wonders, though, why the fact that the accused persons were “re-arrested” not in the GNA report used by Joy FM? It may be that it was not in the GNA report because the GNA reporter did not know that they had been “re-arrested”. For how can you “re-arrest” people who are already in custody? And, on that fact, at least, the GNA and The Ghanaian Times do agree; they both state that the men “were not in court”. This should have been anticipated by the Prosecution team; they were saved only because The Ghanaian Times reporter was a damned good one.

In fact, the evidence suggests that once again, the Government has shot itself in the foot in a matter involving public relations. It has allowed itself to be accused of something that has not happened, namely, that it has behaved suspiciously in the way it is prosecuting – or not prosecuting -- this sensational cocaine case.

Now, I know that lawyers operate on a wavelength entirely different from that of journalists. Prosecuting lawyers go to court to try to win cases, not to provide stories for newspapermen. So, what they are concerned with, primarily, is to employ strategies and tactics that will unsettle their opponents, the defence. So the Prosecutors would not have been in any hurry to say any more in court than was strictly necessary for their purposes. They had made a submission of nolle prosequi. It was for the defence to oppose the submission (if they were inclined to do a crazy thing like that!) and for the judge to grant it (as he would, since no sane judge would want to go ahead with a case which the prosecution is asking him not to proceed with.)

End of the matter? Normally yes. But not, I am afraid, in this particular case. The Prosecution, in my view, ought to have taken ‘judicial notice’ of a few relevant facts: this case is so sensational that the President of the Republic himself had been drawn into a verbal brawl on some aspects of the case; the Asantehene had, similarly, been drawn into making a highly atypical public statement on aspects of it, which some had distorted to mean no less than the declaration, by him, of an ‘ethnic war’ in Ghana; and it had shown that some members of the top echelons of the Ghana Police service were connected with some of the alleged criminals in the case. All these factors had combined to excite the public to wild fantasies about the matter.

In other words, the case long ago ceased to be a mere ‘case’ being handled by lawyers, and turned into a political hot potato being watched with eagles’ eyes. So whilst the lawyers should be allowed to go about it in their professional manner, they cannot ignore the fact that every step they take will be subjected to ruthless analysis, or even phantasmagoric dissection, by members of the public.

Now, I know that the AG’s department has always been an overworked department, with too many cases being handled by too few lawyers, largely because while the public expects them to deliver the goods on behalf of good order and public probity, the Government persistently refuses to give them the resources to achieve that objective. Even in a country like Britain, which is brimming over with legal talent, the AG’s department often goes to the private legal sector to hire legal brains to lead prosecution teams. I doubt whether Ghana ever does that. But at the same time, we also don’t want to pay the lawyers who are actually employed by the AG’s department, the salaries that will attract more of the brainier type of lawyer to the AG’s department.

Labouring, as they do, under these shortcomings, it is easy to see why the lawyers in the AG’s department would not willingly stray into the area of public relations, in addition to their heavy workload. So I suggest that in this case and others like it, in which the public interest is intense, if they had the time, the lawyers in the AG’s department should, whenever something controversial – such as a submission of nolle prosequi -- came up, solicit the assistance of the Press department of the President’s Office, or the Ministry of Information, in presenting to the public, the facts they have put to the court.

A short summary of the speech [to be] made to the court by the leading counsel in the prosecution team should be prepared in advance and distributed to the media immediately after the court session. I was going to say immediately after the speech had been made, but if that was done, it would distract the media from following the case properly -- for instance, they could ignore what the opposing lawyers would say, and even more crucially, what the judge would say. If the AG’s department would like to dust some files and look into them, they would find that Geoffrey Bing, QC, Attorney-General, and Kwaw Swanzy, Attorney-General, were very good public relations people, in addition to being good lawyers.

I am sure that the defence and even the bench often complain that they had not been adequately ‘covered’ by the media. That is almost inevitable, since they are almost always reduced to reacting to what the prosecution does or says and cannot easily prepare beforehand to pre-empt bad or lazy reporting. The AG’s department, on the other hand, can get its side of the case properly covered, by anticipating what will arouse public interest. Therefore, if it leaves the Government open to all manner of unfounded suspicions, by ignoring the public relations aspects of any ‘juicy’ cases it is handling, then, I am afraid, it has a case to answer.