By Richard DABLAH
Ghana’s public life has been rent by a question that ought to be simple and, instead, has become urgent: who exercises power in a democracy when an institution designed to hold the powerful to account is itself accused of misconduct? The letters of the question point toward procedure; the spirit of the question points toward legitimacy. At the centre of that vortex stands Mr. Martin Kpebu—forceful, unforgiving, unrelenting—whose denunciations of the Office of the Special Prosecutor (OSP) have stripped polite abstractions into a raw civic contest over authority and accountability. His demand is stark: resignations, accountability, re-rooting of power in the people. The constitutional test that follows will determine whether Ghana’s anti-corruption architecture is mature enough to survive the heat of political life.
Kpebu’s public invective is tactical and philosophically pointed. He has accused Special Prosecutor Mr. Kissi Agyebeng and his deputies of institutional dereliction—most notably arguing that the OSP “sat on its hands and allowed Ofori-Atta to go out,” a charge that frames inaction as abdication of duty. He has insisted the office manufacture or misrepresent inter-agency cooperation and has said that, in consequence, the Special Prosecutor’s “credibility is scattered.” In town halls, on television and at protests he has thundered: “the OSP is not your personal property,” and demanded that the leadership step down. These are not temperate complaints; they are civic indictments meant to pivot public sentiment and to force a constitutional conversation about what prosecutorial power may and must do.
Yet Kpebu’s fury cannot be read only as the theatrics of a single litigant. It is also the sharp edge of a popular ethos: that public office is a public trust, and that where the public perceives betrayal, it retains the sovereign right—indeed the duty—to call leadership to account. That sovereign claim is not merely rhetorical; it is the political grammar of popular sovereignty, the doctrine that “ultimate power belongs to the people.” In a healthy republic, that doctrine constrains officeholders and disciplines institutions that drift from their purposes. Kpebu’s demand that the OSP leadership answer—to resign, to face inquiry, to explain—speaks directly to that foundational idea.
But the OSP debate is not a two-person quarrel. The office itself has responded with institutional formality: declaring Kenneth Ofori-Atta a fugitive when he failed to return to assist investigations and setting out procedural rationales for its actions. The OSP’s public record and press statements show an agency using legal tools to pursue alleged wrongdoing, even as it confronts a cascade of public complaints and petitions. Meanwhile, petitions and coordinated public agitation are mounting against the Special Prosecutor’s leadership—pressure that ends not in quiet adjudication but in a political atmosphere where accusations and counter-accusations feed one another.
If our task were only to catalogue opposing claims, the story would be mechanical and forgettable. The deeper, less visible conflict is juridical: how does an office created by statute but born into a constitutional order fit within the prosecutorial hierarchy the Constitution erects? This is where philosophy meets law. The OSP Act—promulgated to create a specialised anti-corruption engine—does not exist in a vacuum. Article 88 of the 1992 Constitution reserves the conduct and initiation of prosecutions to the Attorney-General; statutory delegations are circumscribed by that constitutional pre-eminence. The OSP enjoys operational independence in certain domains, but its authority is tethered to a constitutional framework that keeps prosecutorial power from becoming a private fief. The practical point is simple: the OSP’s autonomy is real but not absolute, its mandate potent but not sovereign.
This constitutional architecture has moral consequences. In a polity in which the people are the ultimate reservoir of political legitimacy, institutions must simultaneously be empowered and contained—empowered to do their duty, contained so they do not become unanswerable to the public or to coordinate governmental authority. The OSP’s very raison d’être—an independent office able to pierce protective networks—was meant to re-balance power. But the designers of that balance refused to make the OSP an island; they left it in the constitutional stream that runs through the Attorney-General. That decision was prudent. Unchecked prosecutorial power, however well intended, can produce new kinds of repression or selective enforcement; insufficient power produces impunity. The OSP was meant to navigate that shoal.
Kpebu’s political assault aims to transform perceived procedural failures into an argument about legitimacy. He insists that where an institution misuses its place, it forfeits its moral claim to operate. And in the courts of public opinion, moral forfeiture is often terminal. There is an undeniable potency to that claim: public office is licensed by public trust; when that trust is lost, so too is the instrumentality of the office. Yet there is also a practical danger. If political actors weaponise allegations of misconduct to disable an institution precisely when it is probing powerful figures, then those allegations become instruments of impunity. The critical democratic virtue—independent adjudication—becomes hostage to political timing.
This makes the OSP debate a stress-test of democratic institutions. Two kinds of error are possible and both are lethal to accountability. First, we can permit politics to hollow out institutional independence by delegitimising prosecutors at the moment their inquiries become inconvenient. Second, we can permit prosecutorial offices to become so insulated that they are beyond reasonable civic scrutiny. The right response lies between these dangers: robust, transparent, and legally anchored review mechanisms that can test claims of institutional failure without reflexively disabling investigatory capacity.
Where, then, should citizens place their insistence? Let the insistence be threefold.
First, insist on scrupulous transparency from the OSP. An office that prosecutes on the people’s behalf must be answerable—procedurally and publicly. If Kpebu’s charges of fabricated inter-agency communication are true, they should be met with immediate, public explanations and, if necessary, an independent inquiry. Transparency is not a substitute for secrecy where secrecy is required by law; rather, it is the sinew that connects institutional action to civic consent.
Second, insist on a fair, independent investigatory panel when substantive questions arise about the OSP itself. The law provides for internal and external checks; the public should demand their rigorous application. A credible, time-bounded review—made public in its terms, remit and findings—will serve multiple goals: it can clear the innocent, discipline the negligent, and insulate the prosecutorial process from being commandeered by partisan motives.
Third, insist on the constitutional realities that frame prosecutorial power. The Attorney-General’s role is not an arcane relic; it is the constitutional safeguard that keeps decentralised prosecutorial energy aligned to rule of law commitments. Strengthening cooperation between the OSP and the AG’s office—clear protocols, defined thresholds for action, public memoranda of understanding—will reduce ambiguity and blunt the weaponisation of dispute. The alternative is endless constitutional argumentation that dissipates public trust.
One final and unavoidable truth: the drama of the moment—protests, petitions, televised denunciations, and even detentions of critics—reveals a polity impatient for integrity and impatient for credible processes. That impatience is justified; it is a civic engine. But impatience alone cannot substitute for juridical rigor. Without process, public rage calcifies into faction; without impartiality, procedure becomes perfunctory theatre.
Martin Kpebu speaks for an anger that is real. The OSP is an institution that must be defended when it is acting in good faith and reformed when it betrays its mandate. Ghana’s task is to place both demands on the same pedestal: accountability for the institution and accountability by the institution. That is the moral grammar of a mature democracy.
Power, in the end, is not won in spectacle or seized by the loudest hand. It is tested in institutions that can be challenged and yet survive challenge; that can be criticised and yet retain the capacity to pursue the public interest. The OSP moment is Ghana’s test. If we pass it, we will have strengthened the sinews that hold our constitutional order together. If we fail, we will have learned the harder lesson—that authority untethered from scrutiny, or scrutiny weaponised into protective cover, both corrode the public good.
The people who watch this drama unfold should judge not by slogans but by the systemical answer: did an office charged with rooting out corruption behave lawfully, transparently and in accordance with the Constitution? If not, the remedy is procedural and public. If yes, then the actors seeking to disable it must be named for what they are—antagonists to the enterprise of accountability.
Kpebu and the OSP are not the ends of this story. They are, rather, the moment through which Ghana must show whether its institutions command faith because they deserve it, or because they are the last shelter of a political order that refuses to be held to account. That is the question at hand—and the nation must answer it not with fury alone, but with the hard light of legal process and civic courage.
