It was an aching, paralysing knot in my tummy that wouldn’t go away. I was in London, newly arrived and trying very hard not to accept I was in exile. I couldn’t believe that something so gruesome could happen in Ghana.
My distress went far beyond the sorrow I felt for those who had been murdered and their families. I felt sorry for Ghana.
I had seen and lived through what I believed to be the most traumatic things a country could go through before my hurried departure in January 1982, and yet I still thought there were certain things that couldn’t happen in Ghana.
But that July 1982 day, I knew we were as gruesome and could sink as low as any of the peoples in history books or on award-winning news reports played out daily on television.
A colleague Ghanaian journalist in London at the time tried to shame me out of my state of shock by telling me I was that upset only because the victims were important people and I was elitist.
He claimed it was not unknown in Ghana for people, ordinary people, he called them, to be abducted from their homes and killed. It took me a long time to be able to deal with this colleague.
“Excesses” and threats
Maybe I would plead guilty to being elitist, but in my scheme of things if Cecilia Koranteng-Addow had been a market woman or a chief executive of a thriving company and she was abducted and killed because she had jewellery that her abductors wanted, that crime would be on a different level from abducting and murdering her because she was a judge who had made rulings that some people disagreed with.
In my mind, judges were sacred; they were the last resort for the citizen, when all else failed.
I have since then got to see judges at uncomfortably close quarters and told myself I should be careful about putting them on such a pedestal.
However, I suspect that most of us do put judges on a pedestal and would subject them to higher standards than other professionals.
I don’t think the Anas documentary on the judiciary would have had the kind of effect it had, if the subject of his enquiry had been Members of Parliament, or headmasters of secondary schools, or even medical doctors, and they were shown receiving goats in their bungalows.
For years, I wanted so very much to believe that those July 1982 murders genuinely fell into the category of what the late Flight Lieutenant Rawlings termed “the excesses” of the early days of the revolution.
There are some amongst us who would want “the excesses” and the killing of judges to be forgotten and the NDC, which emerged from those traumatic events, to be seen solely as the political party through which the Fourth Republic was born and now believes in multiparty constitutional rule.
On Monday 1 September 2025, when I heard that the president had removed the Chief Justice from office, I got the same aching, paralysing knot in my stomach that I had, back in July 1982, when I heard about the killing of the judges and military officer.
Even though members of the current governing party, the NDC, had said over and over again in the period leading to the December 2024 elections that they would remove the Chief Justice if/when they won and got into government, I did not want to believe they would.
They had after all, made similar threats in the lead-up to the 2008 elections and had indeed, engineered petitions against the then chief justice, Georgina Wood, who had been appointed by President J A Kufuor.
The NDC party chairman at the time said famously, with reference to their determination to remove CJ Georgina Wood, that there were many ways to kill a cat. In the end, they stopped short of going through with their threat.
Setting a president
The story goes that President John Evans Atta Mills invited Her Ladyship Georgina Wood to his office in the Castle and gave her the two petitions against her to read and give him her comments.
After reading through, she reportedly told the president she was happy to be investigated and go through the hearings of the petitions but would only ask that the hearings are done in public at Black Star Square, so the whole country can follow the proceedings.
President Mills did not pursue further the matter of removing the chief justice. President Mills, of course, was nothing like his then vice-president, the current president, John Dramani Mahama.
Apart from the difference in personalities, maybe the fact that President Mills had become president on a razor-thin majority, whereas President Mahama is currently a Supreme Leader, in the true sense of the term, with overwhelming majorities in all arms of government, had something to do with it.
In spite of all that, I had been hoping against hope that President Mahama would not want to go down in history as a president that removed a chief justice.
I kept up this hope even when the president appointed a committee that appeared to many as having a membership of people known for their antipathy towards Chief Justice Gertrude Torkornoo.
I was hoping against hope that the NDC party, coming from a background of people who kill judges, would not want to add the sacking of a chief justice to their profile.
I was hoping against hope that the very eminent NDC-supporting lawyers would take a deep breath and realise that sacking a chief justice does not add any ribbon to their status as legal luminaries.
Unfortunately, there is nothing I have heard or read since the announcement of the removal of the Chief Justice that gives the slightest impression that the people involved in this enterprise even acknowledge the seriousness and enormity of what they have done.
There is nothing to show that they might think that even if, indeed, CJ Torkornoo had done anything to deserve being removed, they were doing a “painful, but necessary duty” in sacking a chief justice.
Far from that, all one can see is satisfaction in having achieved a glorious task and joy in having delivered on a promise made. Hours before the presidency made the announcement, a member of the investigative committee, Daniel Domelevo, posted this on his social media handle:
The strife is over, the Battle done.
If you know, you know.
I believe the famous former auditor general knew exactly what he was doing and his post continues to race around the globe.
As all Christians know, “The strife is o’er, the battle done” is the first line of a well-known Easter hymn, celebrating the resurrection from the dead of Jesus Christ. The hymn continues: “The victory of life is done,/The song of triumph has begun./Alleluia!”
So, there we have it. The song of triumph has begun. They have conquered, they have triumphed. They who kill judges have added the removal of a chief justice to their profile.
Elizabeth Ohene
