Double & Deadly Jeopardy

Bequeathed by the British, Ghana's judicial system displays all the solemn trappings of the Old Bailey, complete with decorous courtrooms and gowned-and-wigged judges. Far higher than the law of the land is Osagyefo (Redeemer) and President Kwame Nkrumah.

Following an unsuccessful grenade attempt on Nkrumah's life in 1962, five men were charged with treason, among them three of the Redeemer's closest associates--Information Minister Tawia Adamafio, Foreign Minister Ako Adjei, and Hugh Horatio Cofie-Crabbe, executive secretary of Nkrumah's Convention People's Party. Tried before Ghana's highest judge, the quintet got a split verdict; two defendants--an Opposition M.P. and a former civil servant--were convicted, but Adamafio, Adjei and Cofie-Crabbe were acquitted.

This would never do. Summarily, Nkrumah fired the chief justice who had presided, declared the verdict void and ordered the five retried. With a new, and presumably wiser, judge on the bench, the retrial was held at Christiansborg Castle, the massive, 300-year-old redoubt that the Redeemer some times uses as executive headquarters. This time none of the five had a lawyer--perhaps understandable in view of the fact that the chief counsel for Adamafio and Adjei during the first trial had himself since been jailed. At one point Adamafio announced with resignation that he had thought over the "unfairness and injustice of this retrial'' and decided that "I must go and die."

How right he was. The twelve-man "jury," drawn chiefly from members of Nkrumah's Ideological Institute, needed only 50 minutes last week to find all five defendants guilty and deserving of death.

Not all of Nkrumah's opponents are subjected to courtroom complexities. The regime announced that Dr. Joseph Danquah, 69, the distinguished scholar and early nationalist leader who ran against Nkrumah in the 1960 presidential election, had died in a detention camp. A heart attack, an official spokesman blandly explained, but in nearby Nigeria the newspapers were full of allegations of death by torture. Snapped Nigeria's President Nnamdi Azikiwe, an old friend of Danquah: "If independence means the substitution of indigenous tyranny for alien rule, then those who struggled for independence have not only desecrated the cause of freedom but have betrayed their peoples."

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