Franklin Cudjoe, the founding president of policy think tank IMANI Africa, has publicly questioned whether the Office of the Attorney-General is equipped to absorb the prosecutorial workload of the Office of the Special Prosecutor (OSP) following a controversial High Court directive.
In a Facebook post, Cudjoe directed pointed questions at Attorney-General Dominic Ayine and his Deputy, Justice Srem Sai, challenging the practical capacity of the Attorney-General’s department to handle the additional caseload.
“How are you faring with the very few cases you are prosecuting? Updates on those have stopped,” Cudjoe wrote, questioning whether the department would establish new courts or push existing ones to sit extended hours to manage the expanded mandate.
The Accra High Court ruled on Wednesday, April 15, that the OSP does not have the constitutional power to independently prosecute criminal cases, ordering that all cases initiated by the anti-corruption body be transferred to the Attorney-General’s department. The ruling rests on Article 88 of the 1992 Constitution, which grants prosecutorial authority exclusively to the Attorney-General.
Cudjoe went further to characterise the ruling as institutionally damaging, invoking the 18th-century French political economist Frédéric Bastiat’s concept of “legal plunder” to describe what he views as a legally sanctioned dismantling of a functioning anti-corruption mechanism.
Deputy Attorney-General Justice Srem Sai, in a statement issued on Thursday, April 16, said the Attorney-General’s Department would fully comply with the ruling and begin steps to implement the court’s order in the coming days, reaffirming the office’s commitment to the rule of law.
The OSP, for its part, has stated it is actively pursuing legal remedies to overturn the ruling, insisting the High Court does not have jurisdiction to effectively nullify parts of an Act of Parliament and that only the Supreme Court holds that authority.
A separate constitutional case filed by private citizen Noah Ephraem Tetteh Adamtey is already before the Supreme Court, asking whether Parliament acted within constitutional bounds when it granted the OSP independent prosecutorial powers. That matter is expected to provide a definitive resolution to the legal questions now dividing Ghana’s courts.
Cudjoe’s intervention adds a civil society dimension to a legal dispute that has already created conflicting positions across divisions of the High Court and placed Ghana’s primary anti-corruption institution in a state of operational uncertainty.
