Hundreds of people, who watched the first screening of a video on alleged corruption of members of the judiciary, including 34 judges, in Ghana have expressed shock at the level of corruption in the Ghanaian society.
The media on Wednesday carried stories and photographs of Tuesday night’s screening of the video.
The screening went ahead after Paul Dery, one of the judges cited by investigative journalist, Anas Aremeyaw Anas, dropped a suit against the screening of the video after bailiffs failed to locate him.
Managers of the Accra International Conference, which burst at its seams, as hundreds thronged the premises, could be charged for contempt after going ahead to show the video in spite of being served a suit not to do so.
Lawyers are returning to the courts to do legal battle over whether any laws have been broken in the screening of the video.
The Chairman of the National Peace Council, Rev. Emmanuel Asante, was quoted as saying that the video showed that Ghana is “rotten, torn apart and smelly.
“It is painful watching men and women charged to protect our rights compromise themselves with such careless abandon.
“This clearly shows how our own doings have made this country rotten and smelly.”
Asante said it was a shame to see how judges had become slaves to money and created a systemic corruption across the courts of the country.
“This is what we have seen and it shows that this is just the tip of the iceberg because it tells you corruption has eaten to the very core of our society and we need to wake up as a people and do something about it,” he said.
Asante was, however, happy that not all the judges in the video bowed to money.
He said the few judges who refused to take bribes and actually threatened to cause the arrest of Anas and his team represented the hope that all was not lost yet.
Report quoted some of the people who watched the three-hour video as describing the judges captured in the video as “pathetic,” considering that they traded justice for “peanut”.
“The whole thing is pathetic; pathetic meaning that we live in a country where justice can be manipulated just like that.
“They have manipulated the system and if we really want the system to work, then there must be rules and regulations for such abuses,” it quoted one person as saying.
The report said one viewer was concerned about the seeming free-for-all access to judges which he said was partly to blame for the inducement.
This was just another of a series of videos produced by Anas, whose real identity is not known, as he is always hooded in public, on corrupt practices in the country.
