BY J.A. Sarbah
The Judiciary has always been an obstacle to the P/NDC as a political organisation. The NDC is not an organisation that respects due process and the rule of law.
They despise democratic accountability in all its forms. They see the third arm of government, the Judiciary, which checks the excesses of the executive, as a barrier to their buga buga culture.
For that, they abducted and murdered the three High Court judges in 1982. For that, they reached for the head of the judiciary, Chief Justice Gertrude Torkornoo, and butchered her out in September 2025, just eight months upon Mahama’s second assumption of office.
The GBA is too loud for their liking in its advocacy on constitutionalism and policing of the democratic space. For that, they want to cut off its wings through duplicity with a 100 percent NDC bar. The Ghana Law Society is that body born to do the hatchet job.
The Ghana Law Society did not begin as a professional body with a constitutional grievance. It began as the Conference of National Democratic Congress Lawyers, an explicitly partisan caucus that met under the NDC’s own name while the party was in opposition.
It was at that conference, held in Ho, that John Mahama himself demanded the removal of a sitting Chief Justice he had no constitutional standing to remove. It was at that conference that Mahama promised the NDC lawyers a free pass to the bench to ensure what he called “political balance of the bench.”
Weeks later, the same body dropped the party’s name from its letterhead and re-emerged as the Ghana Law Society, a rebrand, not a birth. Rockson-Nelson Dafeamekpor did not join this project in 2025 when he filed suit against the GBA.
He was already its Acting President the year it was founded, running a caucus for a party out of power that intended, from its very first conference, to build a bar of lawyers loyal to the NDC rather than to the profession.
The choice of name was never accidental, and it deserves to be named for what it is: a deliberate borrowing from the one jurisdiction least suited to justify it.
In England and Wales, the Law Society is a real, distinct professional domain, the regulatory home of solicitors specifically, separate from the Inns of Court that govern barristers, because the English profession has never been fused.
Ghana’s profession, on the other hand, has been fused since the Legal Profession Act, 1960 (Act 32); every practitioner is simultaneously barrister and solicitor, called to one Roll, answering to one body.
Importing the English title into a jurisdiction that structurally cannot support the distinction it implies is not homage to the common law’s colonial source.
It is camouflage, a foreign, technical-sounding label chosen precisely because it sounds like an ordinary regulatory body rather than what its founding conference already proved it to be: a party caucus in legal robes.
Three years after that rebrand, now Majority Chief Whip of a party in government, Dafeamekpor took the same body to the Supreme Court, suing alongside lawyer Israel Tetteh, asking the court to declare that the Bar Association named across Articles 153, 157, 166, 201, 204, 206, 209, 259, and 261 of the 1992 Constitution was never actually the Ghana Bar Association at all, but any lawyers’ club willing to claim the title, the one he built out of a party conference included.
The motive is not ambiguous, and it should be stated authoritatively rather than left for the reader to guess. Article 144 gives the GBA seats on the Judicial Council, the body that vets and recommends who becomes a judge. Article 157 gives it seats on the Rules of Court Committee, the body that writes the procedural rules governing how every case in the country, including cases against the government itself, moves through the system.
A government that controls, or even shares meaningful influence over, who sits on both of those bodies controls the pipeline into the bench and the procedural terrain every future legal challenge against it will have to cross.
The GBA became an obstacle to that ambition the moment it criticised the Torkornoo suspension and demanded her reinstatement, publicly, as an independent institution answerable to no political party.
What Dafeamekpor’s suit seeks, and what the Constitutional Review Committee’s own report now recommends, chaired by Prof. H. Kwasi Prempeh, Mahama’s own appointee, is a Judicial Council and a Rules of Court Committee no longer guaranteed to include an institution capable of saying no.
Weaken the GBA’s exclusive claim to those seats, and a friendlier Law Society becomes available to fill them instead, or the seats themselves become negotiable rather than fixed. That is not a fight over nomenclature. It is a fight over who gets to choose the judges and write the rules the next time this government, or any government, needs a court to look the other way.
The unified Bar nominates representatives to the Judicial Council and the Rules of Court Committee precisely because the framers wanted a single, uncapturable professional voice feeding those institutions, immune to whichever party happened to control Parliament or appoint the next constitutional review chairman.
A ruling in Dafeamekpor’s favour, arriving alongside a CRC report engineered by the president’s own appointee, does not widen democratic participation among lawyers. It hands the NDC the exact instrument its 2022 conference in Ho was built to eventually become: a standby Bar loyal to the party rather than the profession, positioned to take Efua Ghartey’s seats the moment the GBA’s criticism of government became too loud to tolerate.
Already, the General Legal Council has issued the Ghana Law Society a licence to hold itself as a parallel bar association. There is more: its maiden Bar conference is slated for September 30, 2026, in Kumasi. President Mahama is billed to be in attendance.
Freedom of association is real, and Dafeamekpor was entitled to found a caucus for his party while it was in opposition. What he was never entitled to do is dress that caucus in a borrowed English title that fits nowhere in Ghana’s fused profession, spend three years laundering it into something resembling a profession, then use a sitting government whip’s court case and a presidentially appointed committee’s report as pincers to take the seats that let a party pick judges and write procedural rules.
A Bar built from a political party conference does not become independent by changing its name, and a government does not need a coup to capture a judiciary when a lawsuit and a committee report can do it in the same season.
The battle for the soul of Ghana’s legal profession is not about nomenclature. It is about who controls the pipeline to the bench. And the NDC has just shown its hand. The question is whether the courts will see it before it is too late.
