CONVERSATIONS WITH IDEAS: INTERVIEW WITH OLIVER BARKER-VORMAWOR…

A PhD Research Student at the Faculty of Law, University of Cambridge, Barker-Vormawor, believes that Ghana is absolutely worth dying for. As a leading figure of the social movement, Fix The Country, Oliver has spent the last year in grassroots mobilisation to galvanise support for his call for a new constitution for the republic. Arrested in February 2022 and kept in cells for thirty-five days, his zeal for activism remains as strong as ever. He believes we are just at the beginning of a journey that may outlive all of us.

On this episode of Conversations With Ideas, I sat down with the activist, scholar and proud Ghanaian, Mawuse Oliver Barker-Vormawor…

I’d begin by asking you to tell us a bit about yourself, who is Oliver Barker-Vormawor?

That sounds like an interview question. I don’t know whether you are remembering the myself from your primary school days. I don’t know, I basically think that, in summary, I’m a person who is interested in legal philosophy. Philosophy about how laws, institutions and an economy can be put together in a framework to achieve social justice. Those are the things that I am driven by. As an individual now, I think that a lot of people have come to know me now because of my activism and fascination with fixing the country. Prior to that my interest had been working with the UN system. As a researcher I think things must be done professionally, always in the activist front and questions around social justice…

Why would you leave a PhD programme at Cambridge University to pursue activism in Ghana?

 Let me say this, I think that there are a lot of people who are PhD holders in Ghana, whether they are buying it off the mill or people who have gone to creditable institutions to earn a degree. I don‘t think that. I mean a degree at the end of the day is a paper, nothing more than that. It is research within the structural environment of the academic institution. So, unlike perhaps the formative university degree, PhD is really a display of one’s own research, writing and thinking. But then in many ways, perhaps, I have gotten to a stage where I am questioning more and more the vanity of some of the things that our culture holds dear here; accumulation of degrees, constant money, and things like that. Yeah, you know but I think that to your question as to why I will leave that…I think that the truth is that there is no plan as to how life is supposed to be lived…. there is no requirement that one has to earn a degree or a PhD in life or whatever it is. It is just a journey. We are all in a journey and I……think that it is meaningless. It is meaningless between being born and dying. So, we find things to fill that time and gap. We try to make sense of it and give ourselves some purpose or whatever it is.

I think for me at this point, the bigger question of purpose that is driving me goes beyond just academic enquiries into law as I was pursuing but rather about how laws and social institutions can be better adapted to produce the kind of results and public good that are in the interest of the majority of people. And so rather than studying this in a theoretical framework, I think that I am getting my PhD on the field. I am doing this in a way that is directly impactful and directly linked to the things and issues that I am passionate about. So, I don’t think I am leaving one for the other. It is more like the continuation of what I have always been interested in doing but just in a different academic setting. One that doesn’t issue you a paper but one that gives you a valuable lesson.

Is Ghana worth dying for?

I think that death itself is not a price for anything. So, not that you have given your life for something that is worth something so then the price of admission is death. Anyway, death is something that is going to happen to all of us. And none of us know how that is going to happen and the way in which it is going to happen. You are going to die whether it is your end, or it is a worthwhile cause. The value that we put on whatever cause it is that we consider worthwhile or worth giving our lives for is really subjective and surface description at the end of the day. But I think that because we talk of Ghana in the abstract, we don’t disaggregate it to understand that there are lives of people, communities that are affected. Like every day human experiences that are impoverished by living in Ghana, our time is better served in advancing the cause of social justice anyway. And if that is the process by which one loses their lives, then it is what it is. Death is always destined so you will never know. But yeah, we have no control about it. People die in all kinds of situations. If you asked them whether that was their choice of death, they will say no. If that is how I am going to die, at least I have to choose my poison and I think that in itself is reassuring and comforting, if you like.

Listen to this statement; “A constitution is a living document; let review it if need be” –this was said by the Pres. Akufo-Addo. A statement which I suspect you’d find interesting.

The 1992 constitution of Ghana has proven to be the most enduring in our political history, you advocate for a jettisoning of the 1992 constitution and writing a new constitution entirely from the scratch, why should we do that?

You know one of the things about the 1992 Constitution is that it is a consolidation of bad ideas.

A consolidation of bad ideas…?

And when I say a consolidation of bad ideas, I mean ideas which were untested. When you take the 1992 Constitution, it contains perhaps 80% of what was contained in the 1979 Constitution. And the 1979 Constitution itself contains about 80% or even 90% of what was contained in the 1969 Constitution. When the 1969 Constitution led for about two years; ’69 and ’71 and was overthrown and then the ’79 Constitution about two years. None of these documents were tested by the experience of life and governing a country.

These were the ideas that they consolidated and repackaged into the 1992 Constitution. So, the back of the 1992 Constitution contains ideas that were never tested but which were seen as being handed down through the long history of constitution-making in Ghana. Because of this, there is a certain lack of imagination about how we think about our constitutional systems and constitutional institutions. Because we view them necessarily as being part of the body politics as far as 1969. This is the time it had been tested and its limit has been shown because it had been tested.

Now when you think about the document itself, the fact that people think that oh this has been our longest living constitution, what they mean is that we have had a system which has not suffered military adventurism and so nobody is judging the substance of democracy on its own merit. Forget whether it has been overthrown as a democracy or military intervention. We ought to judge the document by the goods it produces. If it is judged by the fact that all we want to do is to prevent military dictatorship, then you can sign a pact with the devil to prevent a military dictatorship. It has nothing to do with whether or not you are delivering justice and socially liberating your people and economically liberating the mass majority of people. One of the examples I always give is that, if it is just the worries about a coup d’état, all I will do is that, I will design another article 71 framework and put only the police and military on that framework, after all in our history these are the only groups who have been involved in coup d’état and as long as they are economically sorted, that is the only constituency I will tender to.

And the significant history of how this has operated in other countries; whether you are taking Cameroon or Equatorial Guinea, Zimbabwe or Uganda, which have given the military a pride of place and taken care of their interest, even in Uganda we have member of the military who are serving in the parliament.

There is no desire to overthrow the constitutional framework that assures for the elite system certain good even to the detriment of the wider population. And so I don‘t think that the judgment of the constitution has to be different from whether or not we have not had a coup in a while. But we must come down to the basics of it. We are at a point where the number of people who are poor in the country, quantity-wise and percentage-wise is worse than it was in 1981 when Jerry and others did the coup. Unemployment, percentage-wise and quantity-wise, worse. So, our economic indicators, social indicators and political indicators are worse off than they were in 1981 when the 1979 Constitution was overthrown. So, there is no value in preserving a republic just because some elite people still want their hold on power and have access to unaccountable finances, not to be disturbed by the military and you see that as a good in itself? I disagree.

 I don’t think that our judgment of whether we have done well as a republic is whether or not we have prevented a new group from capturing the state or there is a military competition of who captures the state. That is not what we should be judging the state by.

Do you believe there is a constituency in Ghana for that change? Because you cite Chile, yet in Chile’s experience, the referendum for the new constitution was overwhelmingly rejected?

One of the things I have come to understand and see about the political space in Ghana is that there is a lot of impatience in the space. So, people assume that when I say we need a new constitution and in three months you haven’t delivered a new constitution then it is a failure of your idea.

 I think that it is a poverty of imagination. Like the process of building a constituency around new ideas, an idea that has that theme on the first glance, one as establishment and two completely out of the norm of what people have thought was possible, takes time.

For instance, we started all these conversation over two years ago. Last month was the first time we were able to bring people out to the streets in Tamale. And over 10,000 people on the streets of Tamale and all they had on their month was a “new constitution for a new generation”. It takes time to build that constituency. And we have nothing but time. When you look at the rigmarole of our politics, it is leaving a lot of people with impatience that; “give us a new alternative by 2024, if not forever hold your peace’ and I don’t believe in that kind of thick timeline. Kind of moving ideas and building a way about how we move forward as a society.

I genuinely believe that we are in the process and that process could happen in our lifetime or could go beyond our lifetime. Luckily in Chile it led to a political revolution. Now just because you have built a constituency doesn’t mean that there are no other constituencies that will mobilize themselves to fight change. It will happen. I mean we have seen that already happen in Ghana in terms of the level of persecution and what has tendered our form of advocacy and social change. And trust me the more we build the constituency and get people who support this idea, the more the attacks and whatever you have will be. Because you have a political system that is scrambling before the eyes of those who hold it dearly, so they are going to fight to uphold and preserve what they have.

Do you think our two biggest political parties, the NPP and the NDC, are irredeemably broken, beyond repair? Can’t the rallying cry of #fixthecountry be channeled through the party system?

We have always said that what we are fighting for a change of governance and not change of government. But that entails that the main protagonist in governance or trying to get the mandate of people to govern must imbibe some of the ideas in the call for social justice in the ways in politics aspect. Now, I don’t know whether they are broken beyond repair, but I do know that, institutionally, I haven’t seen evidence of any of them having conversations about how we fix a broken party system.

These parties have all the grand ideas about how they can fix Ghana but never have any proposal on their table about how they can fix their own parties in the first place. Unless that process is started and is continuously earning.  What I think is the lack of interest in fixing their internal dysfunction. But, when that happens, surely, it will have ripple effect on the governance system.

Now a lot of people have said, like you are saying, channel all your ideas of reform through the party framework and then let it become mainstream. What I know is that it is much easier to build something new than to fix something that is beholden to itself. And trust me I don’t think as a question of morality, any of the party thinks that there is anything wrong with the kind of model that they are running.

It is winning them elections. That is, it. So, they are not necessarily questioning its logic. In Ghanaian politics, if there is any challenge in the party, it usually from the people who are left behind in the political appointment. And they are angry that why have you brought these people and we have not been brought into the space? But there is never a question about the kind of monies that is being spent during party primaries etc. Whether or not that logic judge with the kind of image and morality that we want to have within our own space. I have never seen that question on a deeper level. So, there has to be evidence of that before it opens itself up for social movement like Fix The Countryto be able to work with them.

Why is it dangerous to depoliticise politics as you argued in your TedTalk?

First of all, it is a defeatist approach to anything. It is almost like one saying to themselves, because I don’t like the rain, I am going to call it water from above. It doesn’t change the fact that when I step out, I get wet. So, what is happening is that, first, you are refusing to recognize what is before you. And you are living in a perpetual denial. Living in perpetual denial doesn’t change the circumstance around you.

I was watching an interview today when the gentleman says to the interviewer, I don’t believe in depression and because I don’t believe in depression, I don’t think I have ever been depressed and I don’t think depression is real. And the interviewer said what you are telling me is nonsense. It is like telling me that you don’t believe in death and so you are not going to die. You choose the things that you believe in. You can decide that what I am doing is not politics or whatever you call it and for which reason you give yourself the license to disengage, license to refuse to question, license to hold accountable. That is in fact what he is doing, as he is choosing a different kind of politics. One of property laxity of accepting things that others do to you and say that oh act of God, I don’t have a say in this. So, it is really dangerous not to have control and be involved in the things that are happening around you. Yeah, it is always in your destiny to assume control.

You have called on the President to resign or be impeached by the minority; my question to you is what next after that?

The bigger word for me is the fact that the president has resigned or has been impeached. That is the growth in our democracy. Now we are at the point of…even when we started saying these things, it seemed like out of bounds…it seemed incomprehensible that in our democracy people can say these things. And I always want to push the limits of what people think or can imagine is institutionally impossible within our democracy. So, pushing the limits of people’s imagination is what is most critical to us. And I think if that happens, it consolidates within the Ghanaian population the sense that there is actually a limit to presidential powers.

That is a bigger win. Not what happens after that. I remember when John Mahama was in power, and I always used to say that voting him out of power and creating a one-term president was a win in itself because it was going to show office holders that Ghanaians were capable of saying no to you and that you do not have the divine right to a successful eight-year term. And that for me was a win.

If you ask me today, I’d say we ushered in a worse era than ever, I believe that fairly. But it doesn’t mean that I didn’t believe that we needed to vote John Mahama out at the time that he was voted out. Forget about the consequences. Sometimes it is the beauty of the process, in building institutions in the process rather than the end results.

Do you think our political leadership is simply clueless or inherently wicked?

I think I have written about this. I don’t believe that any of them is clueless. I think that it is intentional about the kind of system they are running. They understand the kind of psychology of the people they are lording over, and they have survived. It is really a smart and cunning political class.

And so, a lot of time, I hear people who say things and assume that people don’t have the intellectual capacity to comprehend the errors of their ways. They know exactly what they are doing. So, it is not about smartness. It is about whether we are trying to get value, the set of values and ethics that we demand of them are in place….so it is really a values issue rather than competence per say.

I used to listen to your podcast, Talking Ghana. The tagline for your podcast is, ‘Talking Ghana is a biweekly podcast dedicated to the Left, Right and Centre of Ghana’s politics’. So, I’m going to ask you rather pointedly, where does your politics fit on this spectrum?

I think that I am definitely ultra-left. I think that I am left of the left. But this has to be clarified in terms of people’s social decisions. I think that the state must get out of the business of people whether they should have a wife or to have a husband. Whether or not to have two spouses or more. Whether or not they want to have more husbands. I think that it is not in the business of the state to show people how to live their physical lives. Yeah, so that is a very leftist idea. And in many ways because it is a left, they come to join the libertarian, almost in that regard. But economically I don’t agree the libertarian. I am really for the building of a welfare state.

I think that the purpose of a state is to take care of people. I think that is the only logical reason why we have the state. And the vision I have is one that…. And I don’t think that any of those ideas are represented in the political class in Ghana. Across the divide, these are IMF loving political parties that we have. I don’t find myself politically represented here. I don’t find a community in that sense but here I am.

What represent the left in Ghana? Because if you look at our politics now, I do not see a Left, it is almost as if the NPP and the NDC are now converged at the centre?

It is completely true that these are centrist parties. I think it says a lot about us as a people that because we are so unable to commit. That is why we have something we call the hybrid constitution. Oh, we are choosing a bit of the presidential and a bit of the parliamentary and we are missing them up. We are so centric……

The youths and politics. What must we do as young people to get a lot more of our contemporaries into important political positions to drive policy?

I am more interested in political participation beyond and not just like … because when you say politics, a lot of the time we use it for the short time of elections, and I don’t think we have brought enough sanity to our elected offices such that I’d want to put more young people there and expect some dividends.

I think that in terms of political participation whether in terms of organizing, petitioning, demonstrating, doing all the things that are within the political participation value chain, I think that a lot of people have to……..but to do that we have to reduce the cost of activism  – the burden of activism – the price that one has to pay, the attacks, the social rejection, the social rebuke and all those things that are turned to voices that speak up, makes it such that it is not interesting for a lot of people to get into it.

 Unless we reduce the cost and the price that one must pay for speaking up, we are not going to get a lot of people to get to this stage. For instance, even within our own civil societies for them to host an event and have you as a key speaker as an activist, it will not happen, they’d rather have a minister of state because they don’t want to ‘piss off the government’. Unless we fix the gap in it, the kind of change we are thinking around, the social compensation or social renumeration for people who decide to activists, a lot of people are not going to go into it. And I think that we must change.

How do you feel when you look across our political landscape and the three most likely to be the next President; Bawumia, John Mahama and Alan Kyeremateng, are all going to be over 60 years in 2024 and juxtapose that with our population pyramid, with about 70% of our population below 35 years?

I think that as one of the evidence of a lost society, to be honest. Talk of Mahama. This is somebody who has been rejected and opposed in a way that was a landslide. A lot of the people who are his enthusiasts are so because of the absence of options on the table. Not maybe even absence of options on the table as such, I think it is the way our politics is structured; it is given to the highest bidder. And he will be the highest bidder and that they are bringing him back, despite the rejection.

Then we have others like Bawumia and Alan, who have been participants in the kind of system we have. They shouldn’t even be part of the conversation. They should be so far away, not to be thinking about the presidency if we had a society that places any social rebuke on bad governance……. they shouldn’t be near that.

So, I think it is very distressful that we are back here again. And every time it feels like we are pushing towards the goal and direction, it is like trying to push the rock up the hill. We can’t even rest a little and the rock comes crushing down. And it is a bit exhausting mentally and it is probably the reason why a lot of Ghanaians have checked out and have lost believe in the country to return again.

How would you advocate we deal with campaign financing?

I am somebody who is not a big fan of public financing of political parties. I am a strong advocate of public financing of civil society organizations which doesn’t appear to be one of the options ever on the table. Our civil society organization is hundred percent dependent on the benevolence of Western taxpayers.

And it is completely insane that we expect a democracy to stand on its wheels when our civil society is the least funded and has the least access to capital to be able to challenge the dominance of the political parties. And to think that some of these civil society organizations are championing even the idea of giving more clean money, because really the political parties have access to money, they don’t have access to clean money. And they are championing these ideas that they are going to strengthen these political parties to the detriment of our sovereign state seems a bit bizarre to me.

Now surely if there was suitable attempt to vet funding and spending done by political parties and political candidates, if there was a way in which we had automatic disqualification mechanism, such that if a candidate paid a bribe to a delegate or a voter, such a candidate is automatically disqualified, it deters human greed on itself……

The candidate pays a price to the delegate. This is what I mean by that; both candidate A and B are going into an election and the rule is that if anyone who pays one cedi gets disqualified. All candidate B has to do is to send some of his supporters to candidate A’s event and get one cedi from them and use that to go and see the disqualification of the other. So we set them up against each other; it will reduce, you know, bribe paying and vote-buying for campaigning in many ways. If we eliminate that, we would have eliminated about 80% of the cost of public elections in Ghana.

It will regulate campaign window. It will regulates where you can post your posters. Let’s say you have like environmental eyes or whatever around, all those will have a possible regulation around that. Regulations that have consequences for your electability and eligibility for polls not just like fining you but just that you are disqualified… people will clean up their own acts and it will reduce the cost of our elections. And then the tracking of the money that they have spent. The revenue agencies will have to do a better job, I think. Just to talk about, you mentioned the “talking Ghana podcast”, one of the things I talked about was hiving off the mandate of monitoring election financing of the EC to other agencies because it doesn’t make sense that the one that is running the election is the one that has to audit the books of political parties. The one that has to check public financing and getting too much under its umbrella mixed up and this can’t be an effective player in any of the election mandate that they have.

What do you make of the office of the Special Prosecutor?

I was one of the biggest advocate for it, quite surprisingly. I think, obviously, the role that has been given to it is one that should have required a constitutional reform. But we are always preferring the shortcut approach and so constitutionally, looking at the kind of framework we have now, I don’t think that parliament has the power to create Office of the Special Prosecutor.

 Our constitution gives exclusive prosecution powers to the Attorney-General. Powers given to the Attorney-General means that parliament cannot take away from the power the Attorney-General has. They don’t have the authority and mandate to do that. Only the constitution can be reformed to cede any part of that power to somebody else. I think we have created a constitutionally vulnerable institution. I won’t be surprised that when it gets to finally convict somebody, the person might be able to challenge the conviction successfully, that he doesn’t even have the authority to prosecute. And I think that we are going to end there at some point. Trust me if I was also on the bench, I will say that the office is unconstitutional. Not because I don’t like the idea of having one, but I don’t believe in the shortcut approach…. the constitutional reform will do us a lot of good rather than we do it under the table.

You were detained by the police in the Ashaiman police cells for 35 days. When you came out of prison, you shared a list of books you read whilst in detention. These included Steve Biko’s I write what I like, Achebe’s The Trouble with Nigeria, Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, John Mahama’s My First Coup D’etat… I am curious to know, why those books at that particular period in time?

Interestingly, I think the only book I requested to read was the…. I have forgotten the title, No Man something. It was the only one of the lots I think I requested to read. The other ones I had other people who made that decision because of my reading habit. Because I wanted to be opened to new ideas and different things. The only book I didn’t want to read was a book written by Mandela but I think I read one written about Mandela.

Yeah…Richard Stengel’s Mandela’s Way

 But not by him because I didn’t want to be too cliche. I was really opened to different ideas, and I wanted to fortify my mind. Secondly, I understood that my detention was really a psychological game by the Executive arm of government. Their wish was to break me down psychologically and by extension weaken the social movement we were trying to build. So it was important that I edified myself mentally by drawing inspiration from other people and one of the biggest for me was one with the South African priest, Desmond Tutu. That I think was impactful to me.

I write what I like, I think for now has changed my perception about Steve Biko and now I count myself as a Steve Biko fanatic. So, yeah it is only because I allowed myself to be opened to people’s book recommendation that was able to trigger…. got inspired to read a little. So, if I was to say anything, I will say the South African struggle is resonated with me…it was African in nature. A people whose spiritual life I could understand better and what they were fighting for I could directly relate in what they were dealing with. So, yes, I think that had a better impact on me.

I am going to focus on one, My First Coup D’etat, what do you make of the book? I must admit that was the most curious one for me on your list. I understood the rationale for the others but not this.

{Laughs] To be honest, it came out of a desperate desire to be mischievous… when it was recommended to me, I said, sure, because of the title “my first coup d’état” considering that I was [in jail] …. on the idea that I was trying to provoke a coup d’état in this country. So that title in itself was, why I wanted to be provocative. It is a book I had a long time, but I never bothered to read it. Reading it, I think a lot more could have been done with it. It wasn’t one that I would say had impact on me in any deep sense, but it is also only the second book written by a sitting President. Because all the books written previously were written by Nkrumah while he was the President. And I wanted a lot more from it than it revealed. I don’t think it offered a more political insight and it is not surprising that his governance was a substandard as we all know.

In one of your satirical moments on Facebook, you ridiculed something Alan Kyeremateng said about how difficult it was for the NPP to craft a campaign message due to the economic crisis we are faced with now. You then suggested to him the message of fix the country. I am going to ask, how do you transcribe an activist message like fix the country into a coherent political campaign message for an incumbent, that is increasingly under pressure?

One of the things I find very interesting in that whole idea is that coming from a government that is run by a PRO machinery, it is interesting that he is offering a continuation of that same way of dealing in governance in this country. And to be fair, not only this government, it has become a way of leadership in this country that I think it is unserious. And to think that he is not saying that having been in government and my perspective of things he is able to craft something that exonerates himself as an individual, he gave me clarity of the thought on the changes in the reform we need as a country to go forward. It is always about what sounds nice. I think that we have gotten ourselves into this PR game way too much. When you think about Fix the country for instance, it wasn’t thought about. It wasn’t deeply reflected on. It didn’t require any of that. It just was a summation of the frustrations and the feelings of a generation at a particular point in time. And it reasonated because it did the exact thing for the youths at an emotionally connected place. So, if he was leaving, I think the first thing to do was to look for why he wants to leave, and it would have come naturally.

But that complete break wasn’t going to be easy, because, he had been a cabinet minister for six years and so he was an integral part of the administration…

Alan Kyeremanteng was a curious one for me. There was a time that I kind of broke news about him resigning and he didn’t. And I always wondered why he stayed in government for that long. A lot of people tell me because we are in a country where people don’t really care about that. All they want is to convince them that you are loyal and just stay in even if it is bad. Ghanaian voters will not punish you for that, but Ghanaian voters will punish you if you dump the ship knowing that it was going to crush. Like I said these are not unintelligent people. These are intelligent people who are always playing to the psyche of the Ghanaian population. So, for where he sits maybe it is not a lost that he stayed in for too long. And perhaps that seems a little bit of what you are saying now that it is too late for him to rebuke the kind of government that he has been part of. To chastise the current direction and the things that he was unable to do and wished he could have done and that he stayed out of a desire to help, but he tried two years after the second term, didn’t work and he walked away. Maybe they feel at a point Ghanaians will punish them more for that honesty than if they said everything was perfect and I just wanted to continue in that perfection and maybe Ghanaian voters will say oh yeah. I don’t know but at least he has been loyal. I really don’t know what makes one a good politician. I am not one, so it is difficult to know.

How do you see the future of democracy in Ghana?

I think that at first, we need to have a democracy before we can think of its future. I don’t think we have one.

We do have one, perhaps you can say it is dysfunctional…We have presidential term limits and stuff.

I actually don’t think we have one. I think we haven’t created a theory of electoral dictatorship. And because we don’t have a fully comprehensive theory of electoral dictatorship, we confuse what we have and name it after the only example we know which has election in it, which is a democracy. So, in the same way you will go to Cameroon and Equatorial Guinea, and they will all say that they have democracy because the marker of democracy has become elections.

But we do have presidential term limits…? In Cameroon, there is nothing like that…

We have the UK which doesn’t have term limits for either the head of state or the prime minister and yet they call that democracy.

But that is a different example…

That is why I am telling you that the existence of limits themselves is not evidence of democracy. You can have a democracy without those limits. It is always like we are struggling to find pointers to what makes our system a democracy. I think that the essence of democracy is limit to power. I don’t think there are any limit of power in this country. And because there are no limits to power, it is a dictatorship. So, to improve it, we need to have a democracy first. We need to put in place a proper limit, then we can improve upon it.

As a lawyer, let me ask you this, why is the cost of legal access in Ghana so expensive?

I have fought this thing for so long which has pushed me into poverty because I am then compelled to offer my services on pro bono only to people and I don’t make money as a lawyer. But it is bizarre to me that a legal market which is enforced from top to down, you have the Ghana Bar Association which comes out with a scale of fees. In fact, a vast majority of lawyers do not charge according to that scale of fees. They are charging below it. I have always seen the lawyer as a calling rather than avenue to enrich oneself. And it is something that I am completely saddened by, but it is a fight that when I am fighting, I am fighting alone because the vast majority of people that the legal market is a servicing haven’t said enough is enough. When you go to other places……. lawyers have come out onto the street to protest the cost of justice……. you will not get lawyers in Ghana to do that because our society values people who can make money and as much of it as possible. We don’t even have pro bono requirements for lawyers and law firms. I am a member of the New York Bar Association. To renew my license, I need to prove that I have done 50 hours of pro bono work. It doesn’t exist in this state. I don’t know but I think that we have fixed a general morality around money and wealth.

What will be your last word to the youths of Ghana in these desperate times we find ourselves?

I think that I have always said that we are all going to die anyway. Our lives here are meaningless. There is no value and there is no purpose. Whatever we make of it is what gives us value. And I would rather live a life considering the meaningless of life itself, one that is a service of humanity and another being. And if that is compelling enough to you then look into it. There is no reason why all of us have to be treacherous or chasing because of this rat race of wanting to make money at the expense all our humanity. We can sacrifice it. We don’t need much to live and survive. That will be my message. It is all vanity.

That raises a lot of interesting questions… in our society now wealth determines the quality of even healthcare…?

But the society that you don’t need health you don’t need money to provide health care. Yes, I will agree.

I think you cannot be modest and live comfortably in Ghana. You need much even to be able to afford the basic things…

So, the question then is not to deprive ourselves of our own humanity by chasing that but rather to build the system that conforms to our demand for a certain humanity. Not to abandon our humanity but this is how I see it. Yes, I completely agree with you that we have built a money system that people are caught in this rat race out of the necessity of doing it. But the logic to then fighting it is not to grind ourselves to a halt in terms to be able to survive but to remake the system. And after all humans create the system so humans can remake it. So, why are we devoting to unworkable system?

I am most grateful for your time…

I appreciate it.