Ghana’s opposition is in court, in custody, and at the diplomatic corps simultaneously asking foreigners to save it from a legal system its own leaders attacked this week. The NPP’s accountability crisis is real. Its response to that crisis is making things worse.
By The Kasoa Economist · Ghana Development Watch · 20 May 2026 · Article 07 of 10
On 17th May 2026, Alexander Afenyo-Markin, Minority Leader, Member of Parliament for Effutu, and one of Ghana’s most senior practising lawyers, stood before a press conference and publicly attacked the Circuit Court judge presiding over the case of Abronye DC, the NPP’s Bono Regional Chairman remanded to Bureau of National Investigations custody four days earlier. The judge’s bail denial was, according to Afenyo-Markin, politically motivated, a threat to due process, and evidence that the judiciary was “serving the interests of the government.” Two days later, on 19th May, he co-signed a petition, addressed to the diplomatic corps in Accra, accusing the Mahama administration of orchestrating “state-sponsored political persecution.” The Ghana Bar Association, which knows something about judicial proceedings, described his public attack on the judge as “unprofessional and unethical.” His reply: “I cannot in good conscience respect a judge who has no respect for the law.” A Minority Leader and senior lawyer, in 2026, declining to respect a sitting judge because he disagrees with her ruling. Ghana’s accountability architecture is in trouble. It is not in trouble only because of the government.
AN OPPOSITION WITH LEGITIMATE GRIEVANCES AND ILLEGITIMATE REMEDIES
The NPP’s complaints are not invented. Over 16 party members have been arraigned in court since January 2026. Abronye DC, a man who built his reputation on inflammatory attacks and who is now in BNI custody for calling a judge a politician in a sack, was re-arrested on 13th May after leaving the country for health reasons following his first arrest in April. His lawyers applied for bail; the court denied it. That denial may have been correct in law, or it may not have been. But the way to test a bail ruling in Ghana’s legal system is to appeal it. This is a process the NPP has not exhausted but rather hold a press conference attacking the judge’s integrity. The selective enforcement question, meanwhile, is real: pro-NDC commentators made sustained attacks on the judiciary during the previous administration and faced no equivalent criminal consequences. When the NPP says the law is being applied asymmetrically, the historical record supports a charitable reading. That does not make Afenyo-Markin’s conduct defensible.
The Ghana Bar Association’s verdict on 19th May was the response of a professional body that has seen what happens when senior lawyers normalise public attacks on sitting judges. “Disappointed,” it said. “Unprofessional. Unethical.” The GBA did not dispute that the bail decision may have been wrong. It said that the correct response to a bad ruling is a legal appeal, not a political press conference. That is a distinction that Afenyo-Markin, as a lawyer of considerable experience, understands better than most. His choice to hold the press conference anyway tells us something important: he calculated that the political benefit of being seen to fight for Abronye outweighed the professional cost of attacking the judiciary. That calculation may be correct in the short term. It contributes, in the long term, to a culture in which political figures treat courts not as independent arbiters but as opponents to be defeated in public.
“The emerging pattern of intimidation, arbitrary arrests, selective prosecutions, and suppression of free expression bears disturbing resemblance to the dark and painful periods of Ghana’s political history commonly remembered as the ‘culture of silence.’”
NPP petition to the Diplomatic Corps, 19 May 2026
THE DIPLOMATIC PETITION: A DEMOCRATIC IMPULSE WITH UNDEMOCRATIC LOGIC
The decision to petition the diplomatic corps is the most consequential of the NPP’s recent moves, and deserves to be assessed on its merits rather than dismissed as simply partisan. Ghana’s 1992 Constitution was itself, in part, the product of international pressure. Civil society organisations petition embassies and high commissions on human rights issues regularly, and the practice is not inherently illegitimate. But there is a meaningful difference between a civil society group raising concerns about systemic abuse and a major opposition party asking foreign missions to intervene in a domestic legal matter involving one of its own members who has been charged with insulting a judge. The NPP’s petition describes the situation as resembling “the culture of silence” the phrase associated with Ghana’s darkest military period. The comparison is not only premature. It is an insult to those who lived through it.
The petition’s deeper problem is structural. A party that has spent years contributing to the degradation of institutional trust through the normalisation of insults in political discourse and the failure to discipline members like Abronye DC whose style of communication has been rewarded rather than rebuked, and through its own use of state institutions for partisan purposes during its time in government, now asks foreign diplomats to defend it from a government using state institutions for partisan purposes. The irony is not subtle. An NDC MP called it a “diversionary tactic.” That is partisan, but it is also partially correct. Ghana’s accountability crisis predates this administration. Inviting foreigners to adjudicate it does not resolve it. It signals that the NPP has either exhausted its domestic remedies or does not trust them. Given that the NPP’s own conduct has helped make those remedies less trustworthy, that is an uncomfortable position to occupy.
WHAT ACCOUNTABILITY ACTUALLY REQUIRES
The OSP’s April 15th ruling stripping it of independent prosecutorial power, the Attorney-General’s collapse of the NAFCO prosecution within six months of a fanfare filing, and the parliamentary majority’s vote to block the GoldBod inquiry are all legitimate accountability failures that belong to the government. They are serious. They deserve serious opposition. Serious opposition, in this context, means filing constitutional petitions at the Supreme Court, demanding transparency in Parliament, supporting civil society organisations doing accountability work, and above all, demonstrating by its own conduct that it believes in the institutions it claims the government is destroying. Afenyo-Markin attacking a judge in public is not serious opposition. It is participation in the same institutional vandalism he is denouncing, performed from the other side of the aisle.
The Ghana Bar Association’s intervention matters because it comes from outside the partisan frame. The GBA has no interest in defending the NDC’s conduct or in undermining the NPP’s political position. It has a direct professional interest in maintaining a culture in which judicial decisions, including wrong one, are challenged through legal processes rather than through political rallies. When it tells the Minority Leader that he has acted unprofessionally and unethically, it is telling him something he already knows. The question Ghana must ask is why he chose to do it anyway and what that choice reveals about whether any of its major political parties genuinely believes in the institutions they each accuse the other of undermining.
“We are disappointed. You acted unprofessional and unethical.”
Ghana Bar Association, responding to Afenyo-Markin’s attack on the Circuit Court judge, May 2026
Kwame Nkrumah’s constitution was undermined from within. Jerry Rawlings’s PNDC governed by decree. The Third Republic lasted 27 months. Ghana has learned, at considerable cost, that democratic institutions do not protect themselves. They are protected by political actors who choose to use them correctly even when it is politically inconvenient. What the events of May 2026 reveal is that both major parties currently in Ghana’s political arena make that choice selectively, when it suits them, and abandon it when it does not. That is not a crisis of institutions. It is a crisis of character. No diplomatic petition has ever fixed one of those.
Abronye DC is due to reappear before the Accra Circuit Court on 27th May 2026. The Supreme Court’s ruling on the constitutionality of the OSP remains pending. Both cases will test whether Ghana’s legal system is capable of resolving institutional disputes on the merits. The NPP’s diplomatic petition will not affect either outcome. The Bar Association’s rebuke, if heeded, might.
KEY SOURCES: Adomonline — NPP diplomatic petition (19 May 2026) · Adomonline — GBA slams Afenyo-Markin (19 May 2026) · Adomonline — Afenyo-Markin replies GBA (19 May 2026) · Graphic Online — Abronye remanded BNI (13 May 2026) · Diplomatic Times Online — NPP petition to corps (19 May 2026) · Sikaman Times — NPP petition text (20 May 2026) · GBC — OSP High Court ruling (15 Apr 2026)
TOPICS: Afenyo-Markin · NPP · Judicial Independence · Abronye DC · Diplomatic Corps · Ghana Bar Association · OSP · Rule of Law · Accountability
Ghana Development Watch is a 10-part analytical series by The Kasoa Economist. Article 07 of 10.
