Kay Codjoe Writes
It began, as many political tragedies in Ghana do, with a confident press statement. Before the lawyers had even finished reading the charge sheet, Dr. Mustapha Abdul Hamid had already pronounced judgment. The case, he said, was useless, dead on arrival, a stillbirth of law.
The court, however, did not attend this burial.
This week, the supposedly useless case entered the Criminal Division of the High Court and did something deeply inconvenient. It continued. There were no theatrics. No shouting. Just a prosecutor arriving with boxes of material: thousands of pages of bank trails, statements, and exhibits. The kind of evidence that does not trend on social media, but has a stubborn habit of surviving cross examination.
Walahi! Dr. Mustapha Abdul Hamid is not a commentator in this story. He is the first accused in a fifty four count corruption case involving conspiracy to commit extortion, extortion, abuse of office, and money laundering exceeding GH₵291 million and US$332,000, alongside nine co accused persons.
A full scale criminal prosecution.
The court was informed that investigations were still ongoing and that more evidence would be coming. Some accused persons had not yet been served with all the material. The court saw no difficulty in that and allowed procedure to move forward.
One could almost hear the so called useless case quietly clearing its throat.
The defence then asked the court to allow the accused to report to the court registrar instead of the Office of the Special Prosecutor. The application was argued, opposed by the prosecution, and refused by the court. They tried again. It failed again. The judge ruled that the accused must report to the OSP.
To underline the weight of the process, the court added another layer. All accused persons were placed on a stop list at every entry and exit point of the Republic.
Useless cases do not get stop lists.
Then came the most revealing moment of the day. Dr. Hamid had filed an application to strike out the charges. The court ordered written submissions. The OSP filed its opposition. But when it was time to argue the motion, the same people who had been loudly proclaiming that the charges were defective, incompetent, and dead on arrival suddenly developed stage fright and withdrew their application.
The same people who have been telling the public that the OSP’s case is rubbish could not find the courage to say so before a judge. If the case were truly useless, someone would be eager to prove it in open court.
Instead, the courtroom fell silent. The case remained standing, alive, undismissed, and proceeding.
After losing every meaningful procedural contest that day, the court adjourned the matter to 2 February. By then, the record was already clear: thousands of pages of evidence disclosed, two failed attempts to soften the reporting conditions, travel restrictions imposed, and a quiet retreat from an application that was supposed to kill the case.
This is not how useless cases behave in court. Yet outside the courtroom, the jandam-vandam continues. Not for long.
In real life, weak cases shrink. They collapse under their own weight and die quietly. They do not expand, they do not attract more evidence, and they do not force their critics to fight in the media instead of in court. A case that provokes this much legal maneuvering and this much public storytelling is not behaving like a weak case at all.
Courts do not decide cases on social media. They decide them on evidence. And judging by the direction of travel, the evidence in this case is not retreating. It is assembling.
Kay Codjoe
