ACCEPTANCE SPEECH OF THE SPECIAL PROSECUTOR
ACCEPTANCE SPEECH OF THE SPECIAL PROSECUTOR
BY MARTIN A. B. K. AMIDU
Your Excellency the President of the Republic of Ghana
Your Excellency the Vice President
The Honourable Chief of Staff
Honourable Attorney General and other Ministers of State Presidential Staffers
Members of the Press
Ladies and Gentlemen
I wish first and foremost to thank Your Excellency, Mr. President, for the very fact of considering me as a fit and proper person for this position even though I come from the opposite pond of social democracy and in the past, we have been very strong and robust professional adversaries in the development of the constitutional law of our dear country from its inception. Your Excellency’s invitation to me to confirm my acceptance to be Special Prosecutor and my acceptance of the offer demonstrates a fundamental democratic principle and belief to your credit that few people have adhered to for the past twenty-five years. Namely, that adversaries are not enemies and must collaborate for national development by putting Ghana First.
I would not have accepted to come to this job if I did not trust Your Excellency’s integrity and honour from our long years of association from opposite sides at the Bar. I have also given Mr. President my word of honour that I will discharge the duties of the burdensome office you have entrusted to my care with similar integrity and honour, with your support and assistance.
Mr. President, I wish to assure you that the propaganda about witch-hunting will not daunt me from prosecuting all corruption crimes without reference to political considerations, as you had yourself admonished, once a suspected offender is established by investigations to have committed offences prosecutable in the national interest. I will treat crime as crime and nothing else.
I thank you, Mr. President, and the Honourable Attorney General sincerely for the trust you both have put in me and in my capabilities. Above all I also wish to thank and assure Ghanaians that I will do my best to vindicate the trust that the whole nation put in me at my nomination and nomination approval hearing. As an aside I will wish the public to know that nobody has served me personally with any Writ or Statement of Case or injunction challenging my nomination, approval, and appointment so as to restrain me from accepting this appointment.
Before concluding, Mr. President, I wish to use your presence to acknowledge a senior citizen from Accra without whom I might not have been available for this job. Professor J. N. D. Dodoo was my former Hall Tutor at Commonwealth Hall and was formerly of the Department of Modern Languages, Legon. He ensured that I was not cheated out by the exclusion of my name from the LL.B class at the Faculty of Law after my First University Examinations when I had qualified for placement on the programme by merit. His actions almost 43 years ago contributed in no small measure to my passion for the defence of truth, fairness, integrity, transparency and merit in public life and must be publicly acknowledged for once. The General Legal Council may have a lot to learn from him at this time of the problems at the Ghana School of Law.
Thank you, once more, Honourable Attorney General and Mr. President. Thank you to all Ghanaians who stand against corruption. Let us put Ghana First!
Martin A. B. K. Amidu