Mr. Martin Amidu, the former attorney general, is a deeply troubled man; he is a man given to impetuous anger and unruly bombast and he is a shameless publicity hound.
No, I have not psycho-analyzed the man, but then again, you don’t need to subject an individual to a battery of psychological tests to conclude that at the core, there is something fundamentally amiss with him.
Mr. Amidu is an unapologetic and perennial party spoiler who oozes hate, and has made no bones about his intense dislike of the current administration, especially, its head, President John Mahama.
I can’t say for sure what drives Mr. Amidu’s unparalleled animosity. But I would assume that if you are Mr. Amidu and you find yourself marginalized and banished to the fringes of your political party, and subsequently deprived of the prominent role you once played in it, you will acquire a new persona, one that is undeterred by party loyalty, and one that is determined to undermine, subvert and lash out at those who think clipped your political wings.
And that is exactly what Mr. Amidu did when he unceremoniously injected himself into the Woyome case by filing an application at the Supreme Court requesting permission to orally examine Mr. Woyome.
He also falsely accused the president —with no credible or verifiable evidence —of personally instructing the attorney general. Mrs. Harriet Brew Appiah Oppong to discard the Woyome case.
What is more, Mr. Amidu claimed —since as attorney general in the administration of the late president Mills, he successfully obtained a judgment against Mr. Woyome—to have intimate knowledge of how the 51 million Ghana cedis paid to Mr. Woyome was distributed among top government officials.
He also said that he could reveal precisely where Mr. Woyome had hidden his assets. The whole thing would have been comical if it wasn’t a case that has consumed the nation for five long years.
Dubbed citizen vigilante by a cross section of the Ghanaian population that is breathlessly obsessed with anything he does so long as it portrays the ruling party in a negative light, Mr. Amidu’s latest absurdity has reached new heights.
Why Mr. Amidu will elect to interfere in a case that clearly is the province of the current attorney general beats me. Granted, Mr. Amidu was instrumental in exposing the backroom deal that enriched Mr. Woyome, nonetheless, his quest to orally cross examine Mr. Woyome smacks of political opportunism.
Mr. Amidu’s ego suffice it to say, has gotten the better part of him. After all, what was his goal, to embarrass Woyome into confessing that he profited from an illegal transaction or was Mr. Amidu trying to stick it to his political enemies and ultimately ingratiate himself with the opposition? Those are the billion Ghana cedis questions Mr. Amidu has to answer.
While he goes around hugging the media lime light, Mr. Amidu needs to be reminded that he is no longer the nation’s attorney general; his days as the nation’s chief law enforcement officer are long gone and it will be in the nation’s best interest if he just held his fire and walked off into the sunset.
He should continue, what I know is that, an African proverb says “if you watch your fellow anus, someone is also watching yours.