The Chief Justice’s Summer Tour
By Anonymous · 3 September 2026 · Politics
I write not to accuse the Chief Justice of anything, but to worry aloud about him, which I hope you will receive as a kindness rather than a complaint.
Consider first how he came by the seat.
Last September, Chief Justice Gertrude Torkornoo was removed for stated misbehaviour. The committee found three things. The Judicial Service had paid for her husband and daughter to travel on private trips in 2023. She had mishandled the transfer of a staff member, one Mr Baiden. She had tried to shortcut the procedure for nominating Supreme Court judges.
Read that list again, Osagyefo. A family plane ticket. A staff transfer. A paperwork shortcut. In a kinder season these are matters for a memo and a refund. In this season they cost a woman the highest judicial office in the land, and her seat on the Supreme Court besides.
I do not say whether that was right. I say only what it proved. The bar for removing a Chief Justice now sits at ankle height, and the door of Article 146 does not lock behind the person who walks through it. It is still standing open.
Which is why his recent words alarm me.
His Lordship has been touring the agencies of the Executive. At the Minerals Income Investment Fund and at SSNIT he praised what he found, and invited the country to compare it with the eight years before. He is reported to have said that everything must be done to ensure the President's agenda succeeds.Weigh that against a plane ticket, Osagyefo.
His predecessor fell over expenses and an appointment form. No citizen's liberty hung on either. He has now publicly graded a former government while men who served in it stand in the dock of the very courts he heads. Chairman Wontumi is one of them. He is not the only one. He has decided none of their cases, but he has told the nation what he thinks of the era they belong to, and every ruling that follows will be read in that light.
If a holiday ticket amounted to stated misbehaviour, what would a future committee make of a Chief Justice pledging himself to a President's agenda?
The vacation has not helped him either. This week he told us the legal vacation does not stop urgent cases. Cases, he said, do not go on leave. Yet Chairman Wontumi's urgent bail application met an empty bench on 19 August, a notice saying the judge was indisposed and the bench likewise indisposed, and a new date of 15 October. One corridor away, a former Attorney-General was refused his adjournment and told his trial would proceed through the recess.
He answers that these are judicial decisions and not his to make. That is constitutionally correct and publicly useless. The citizen sees one calendar producing two answers and notices who benefited from each. A suit over selective justice has already been filed. It will not be the last.
So if a word could reach him, Osagyefo, let it be this one. Tread carefully.
He holds an office recently proved removable, on evidence many thought thin, by a process that moved faster than anyone expected. Whatever protection that seat once carried, last September showed it carries less.
Let him say nothing of the last eight years and nothing of the next four. Let him visit the courts instead of the agencies, where the roofs leak and the records rot and no photograph taken can ever be produced against him. Let the rulings speak, and let them carry their reasons, so no citizen has to guess why one man waits until October while another is tried in September.
Caution is not cowardice. In that office it is the whole of the job.
Cases do not go on leave, Osagyefo. Neither do petitions.
So long,
Ato_KD