Your Lordship, the Chief Justice, I have watched the four-minute video clip in which you recount your visit to some state institutions, particularly the Social Security and Nationa
The report indicates that i have watched the four-minute video clip in which you recount your visit to some state institutions, particularly the Social Security and National Insurance Trust (SSNIT).
It further notes that in it, you speak approvingly of how well SSNIT is doing today, compared with its condition some time ago, when it was even preparing to “sell its prized asset, Labadi Beach Hotel.” You then wonder, or perhaps lament, what happened during the preceding eight years and how Ghana could have sunk so low.
Never mind that the new management is also reportedly seeking strategic investors for the hotels, undoubtedly to sink SSNIT back to those same depths you believe it had sunk under the previous administration.
Since I served as Chairperson of the SSNIT Board of Trustees from August 2021 until 6 January 2025, I assume that I was one of the people busily digging those depths from which, according to your account, the institution has now so miraculously ascended. I had not realised we were underground at the time, but one learns something new every day, especially from visiting dignitaries.
Your Lordship also referred to “all the things we had all heard” before your visit. I hope this was not the royal “we”. What the whole country and, thanks to the internet, much of the world, heard were lurid claims of “stinking corruption” surrounding what became known as the SSNIT Hotels Scandal.
For that, we may thank the vigilance and megaphone of the Member of Parliament for North Tongu, now Minister for Foreign Affairs, Mr Samuel Okudzeto Ablakwa.
Your Lordship will recall that Mr Ablakwa, invoking “God and country”, petitioned the Commission on Human Rights and Administrative Justice (CHRAJ), alleging serious corruption by the SSNIT Board and Management in connection with the proposed divestment of a 60 per cent interest in SSNIT-owned hotels.
The accusations produced the required national theatre. Headlines screamed, radio studios boiled and social media pronounced judgment with its customary patience for evidence. Organised labour groups, including university teachers, nurses and emergency health workers, threatened industrial action.
Demonstrations followed, complete with placards identifying the villains already convicted in the court of public opinion. The small inconvenience of an investigation, trial and a verdict could, apparently, be attended to later.
Who knows? Had Your Lordship occupied your present office then, perhaps the courts might also have threatened to close their doors in solidarity. On the evidence of your recent enthusiasm, the Judiciary might even have supplied placards, properly stamped and with messages calling for a “Reset.”
My name, Elizabeth Ohene, then Chairperson of the SSNIT Board, featured prominently on those placards and was repeatedly tied to allegations of corruption. I was abused, vilified and deliberately subjected to severe reputational damage. This was not an abstract political quarrel. It was a public assault on the integrity of identifiable people.
I have spent my life in public and private service without tolerating corruption or acquiring a taste for it. I do not require anyone to confer integrity upon me as a favour. But when an allegation is made, presumably investigated and allowed to hang indefinitely over a person’s name, justice demands an answer, not a permanent cloud, only to be thickened this week by the gentleman whose job it is to pronounce judgment from the fountain of justice.
SSNIT instructed its lawyers to file a detailed response to the CHRAJ petition, and they did. In the interests of national peace and security, SSNIT also suspended the divestment process. We did so in the reasonable expectation that CHRAJ would investigate the accusations thoroughly and publish its findings.
More than two years later, there has been no public update, no finding, no declaration that the allegations were established and no announcement that they were dismissed. The accusations arrived with a brass band, bloggers, television cameras and a street procession; the truth appears to have been given a number and asked to wait quietly by the gutters where reputations were dragged through the mud.
