Legal luminary, Tsatsu Tsikata
• Tsatsu Tsikata says Ghana needs a leader who is not vindictive and thinks about the national interest
• He believes late President John Evans Atta Mills typifies that
• He has appealed to the country’s leaders to learn from him
Legal luminary, Tsatsu Tsikata has proffered that Ghana needs a leader whose main preoccupation will be to execute a national agenda and not champion partisan or regime agenda.
Tsatsu Tsikata in a TV interview noted part of the reasons the country’s progress has been slow-paced is because successive governments tend to focus on implementing their plans for the country instead of focusing on completing the works of their predecessor.
He singled out late President Professor John Evans Mills for praise as a leader who was neither vindictive nor partisan and had the national interest at the heart of any move he made.
Tsatsu Tsikata said that, unlike other leaders who come into government with a mindset to prosecute members of the opposing party, late President John Evans Atta Mills was only concerned with what could benefit the country.
He, therefore, appealed to leaders to take a cue from the Mills concept and focus on things that will impact the country positively.
“I look forward to the days in this country where we can actually have leaders like President Mills who are not pre-occupied with trying to prosecute and jail people from other side but say that we are all in this country together, lets see how we can enhance what has gone on before.
“Let’s see how what happened under President Rawlings, Kufuor, Mahama should be continued. That is not really what our records show we have been doing except for the example I gave,” he said.
Tsatsu Tsikata in the same interview spoke about his incarceration under the Kufuor regime and mentioned that the testimony by the states Star witness Jude Arthur untrue.
He said, “the judge had asked us to come early that day so we went at 8 o’clock earlier than usual. One of the first odd things that I noticed was that Attorney General Joe Gartey at that time, had come with his full team and he had been in court for the last one and half years but suddenly that day he is there with a full team of five people. I thought perhaps because we had been applying that what he said in the Supreme Court should be brought, so maybe he was coming to explain something about that. To cut a long story short, things turn in a different direction when the judge actually sat.”
He also added, “originally, the prosecution said they had issues with the viability of the project but then, when we went to the Supreme Court the Attorney General was saying they had no problem with the viability of the project. That was why we were insisting that the records of what the Attorney General had said in the Supreme Court should be now part of the records of the High Court proceedings together with whatever testimonies the IFC was going to be given. So we were not at the stage where judgement really should be expected.
“I did not act on my own as an individual or GNPC didn’t just act on its own as a corporate body. We had Merchant Bank not only as a financial advisor, at that time Jude Arthur was the Managing Director of Merchant Bank, they were not only our financial advisor; they were trustees of GNPC in respect of that project. So, Merchant Bank, and specifically Jude Arthur was actually representing GNPC’s interest on the Board of Valley Farms.”
He continued: “In fact, they introduced the project to us so in terms of viability we were insistent that the records of the IFC together with what the Attorney General had admitted in the Supreme Court would set to rest the matter of viability and that was never allowed.
“Jude Arthur was the key prosecution witness against me and what was interesting was that his testimony was in many respect shown as false.
“Because we managed to get under subpoena, records from Merchant Bank regarding how the Valley Farms project became part of their work in the first place because the imp…