West Africa Desk | Corruption Watch
He lives. Ghana's corruption-fighter walked out of the Supreme Court on Wednesday with his office intact. Unanimous. Seven justices, no dissent: the Office of the Special Prosecutor is constitutional, Parliament was within its rights to build it, and the citizen's suit that spent months threatening to demolish it was dismissed. That is the headline. Now read what the justices attached to it, because it changes who holds the leash.
The court, chaired by Chief Justice Paul Baffoe-Bonnie, held that Sections 3 and 4 of Act 959 do not contravene the 1992 Constitution. But it also held that responsibility for ALL prosecutions in Ghana vests exclusively in the Attorney-General, and that the OSP prosecutes on an authorisation from the A-G, one that, in the court's words, subsists until it is amended. And here is the sentence Accra will be arguing about for months, per Graphic's report of the ruling: the Attorney-General can discontinue any proceedings brought by the OSP.
Sit with that. This desk reported on Sunday that the Attorney-General had sided with the challenger, filing that the OSP's independent powers were unconstitutional, while fourteen civil-society organisations stood alone in the office's defence and the OSP itself was refused a seat in the courtroom where its existence was being decided. On Wednesday the A-G lost the argument. And in losing it, he was confirmed as the man holding the off switch on every case the corruption-fighter brings. He asked for the office's powers. The court gave him its cases.
What it means in practice: the $28 million extortion and money-laundering case against the former petroleum regulator and six others proceeds, and every future OSP prosecution proceeds, under a standing possibility no court can now remove: discontinuance by the Attorney-General of the day. The civil-society coalition got its win, with an asterisk the size of the judgment. And the government spokesman who said before the ruling that the OSP's future may depend on constitutional review suddenly reads less like commentary and more like a schedule.
What this desk watches next: whether the authorisation the court described gets amended, the first time an A-G reaches for the discontinuance power on a live OSP case, and the constitutional-review debate that Wednesday just armed. The corruption-fighter survived his day in court. His independence now lives at the pleasure of the office that tried to end it, and that is not an ending. It is a season finale.
Every claim on this desk is attributed to court rulings, official statements or named reporting, and linked below. All defendants in cases mentioned are presumed innocent unless convicted.
