Following comments by former President John Mahama that he will forcefully pack the Judiciary with lawyers with strong political leanings to the National Democratic Congress (NDC) in the event he wins the 2024 elections, has attracted condemnation from Mr. Bright Nyampo.
In Mr. Nyampo’s view, the former president’s posture shows that when he had the power in the past, he only considered lawyers with NDC party cards before promoting them to the bench.
He slammed the former president noting that “he has said bad things about the court and his recent utterance makes his case bad.”
“Maybe he has collected their cards and seen that they are NPP members. It tells me one thing that before he (Mahama) appointed lawyers to the bench during his tenure, he took their cards before appointing them to the bench so he think Nana Addo is doing as he did.”
Over the weekend, Mr. Mahama spoke at the NDC’s Lawyers Conference and accused President Akufo-Addo of appointing members of the New Patriotic Party (NPP) to the bench to influence decisions in their favour.
According to Mr. Mahama, some of the NDC lawyers should ready themselves to take up positions on the bench to balance out its composition.
“Our lawyers, some of you must be prepared to go onto the bench, I know that some of you have very lucrative legal practices you will not want to leave and go onto the bench”, he said.
According to him“you can see what the current President has done; he appointed the largest number of judges onto the bench. More than 80 towards hundred and counting.
“He’s packed the court and we know that they’ve packed the court because they want to avoid accountability after they have left office.
“So all manner of people who have been known to be partisan, to have been executives of their party who are in the legal profession have been leapfrogged onto the Superior courts and other places.”
However, the Ghana Bar Association (GBA) says comments by John Mahama that the judiciary has been packed with NPP-aligned judges is unfortunate and must be condemned.