Barely two weeks after a High Court stripped the Office of the Special Prosecutor of its prosecutorial teeth, another Accra courtroom delivered what appeared to be the next blow.
On April 29, 2026, Justice Francis Achibonga, sitting as an additional High Court judge, expunged the name of EOCO lawyer Radiatu Abdulai from the prosecution team in the high-profile NAFCO/Buffer Stock case against former CEO Hanan Abdul-Wahab Aludiba and four others.
Defence counsel Godfred Yeboah Dame — the former Attorney-General — objected successfully that no sufficient authorisation from the Attorney-General had been demonstrated for her to appear.
This was not, as some have suggested, a sweeping judicial assault on EOCO’s institutional powers. According to EOCO itself, the lawyers in this matter were only supporting the lead State Attorneys from the Attorney-General’s Department, not acting as principal prosecutors.
The fiats issued under the previous administration were granted on an individual-name basis rather than as blanket institutional authority, and Radiatu Abdulai’s name was simply not included on any current valid fiat. The current Attorney-General is already working to regularise the position by issuing fresh authorisations.
Yet the ruling still matters — and it matters precisely because it reveals how fragile the entire edifice has become.
As a legal practitioner, I sounded the alarm with surgical precision in mid-April. In response to the April 15 High Court ruling in the OSP matter — which declared ongoing OSP prosecutions void without express Attorney-General authorisation and ordered their transfer to the AG’s Department — I warned: “If independence is stripped, effectiveness is compromised.”
A single High Court had effectively neutralised statutory mandates enacted by Parliament, a step that belongs before the Supreme Court alone.
The pattern is now unmistakable. In the Republic v Mustapha Abdul-Hamid & Others (the NPA extortion and money-laundering case), defence counsel invoked the April 15 OSP precedent to seek discharge. The court adjourned the trial to May 26 expressly to await clarity on the OSP’s mandate.
Godfred Dame’s objection in the NAFCO matter supplies the tactical playbook: raise the authorisation point, force the AG to scramble for documentation, and watch the prosecution stall. Whether the gap arises from individual-name fiats, administrative oversight, or deliberate challenge, the result is the same — delay, disruption, and the slow erosion of specialised anti-corruption capacity.
Legally, both rulings rest on Article 88 of the 1992 Constitution, which vests prosecutorial authority in the Attorney-General, and the qualifying language in the OSP Act 2017 and EOCO Act 804. Parliament created these bodies precisely to operationalise that authority through arm’s-length institutions capable of pursuing politically exposed persons without the delays or perceived conflicts inherent in the AG’s Department.
The emerging judicial approach, however, converts that delegation into a case-by-case executive permission requirement that must be proven on demand. Even if the EOCO incident was partly technical and self-inflicted by the previous administration’s fiat policy, it demonstrates how easily the requirement can be weaponised in politically sensitive cases.
The Supreme Court already has before it the constitutional challenge filed by Noah Ephraem Tetteh Adamtey in December 2025, which directly questions the validity of the prosecutorial provisions in the OSP Act. OSP has also filed appeals and stay applications from the April 15 decision. The apex court’s eventual determination will not be a narrow procedural matter.
It will decide whether Parliament’s intent to create functional, arm’s-length anti-corruption capacity survives or whether Article 88 operates as an absolute executive gatekeeping power that can be asserted reactively in every contested prosecution.
The practical consequences are already visible. High-profile files face repeated adjournments, fresh filings, or outright transfer. Defence teams now possess a low-cost, repeatable objection applicable across the board. Public confidence — already fragile after years of grand corruption scandals — erodes further when specialised bodies appear disabled by process.
The promise of robust institutional reform rings increasingly hollow if the executive, through the AG, retains effective veto or supervisory control over the very agencies designed to operate with a measure of insulation.
History offers no comfort. South Africa’s Scorpions were dismantled in 2009 amid political pressure; the result was weakened enforcement and entrenched state capture. Nigeria’s EFCC has repeatedly shown how executive alignment determines enforcement priorities.
Sierra Leone’s Anti-Corruption Commission has seen its effectiveness ebb and flow with governmental transitions. In Brazil, the Lava Jato operation fractured under sustained claims of politicisation.
Once specialised independence is subordinated to routine executive oversight or reactive authorisation requirements, restoring credibility and operational momentum is extraordinarily difficult. The veil of protection for the connected thickens; technical objections become reliable shields.
Ghana invested legislative and political capital in creating the OSP and EOCO as credible instruments against economic and organised crime.
The current sequence of High Court interventions risks converting that investment into a formal but functionally constrained structure — one where the most sensitive cases can be slowed, transferred, or diluted through authorisation disputes.
The Supreme Court now confronts not merely a technical dispute but the larger institutional design question: whether Ghana’s anti-corruption framework will function as a genuine check on executive power or as an extension of it.
The slope is not merely slippery; the first decisive steps downward have already been taken. The question is whether the apex court will arrest the descent before the damage becomes irreversible — or whether the procedural authorisation trap will become the new normal, leaving the corrupt with yet another reliable shield.
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Source: www.myjoyonline.com