IMANI Founding President and Chief Executive Officer Franklin Cudjoe has defended Chief Justice Paul Baffoe-Bonnie’s remarks questioning Ghana’s governance over the past eight years, rejecting the criticism that has followed and arguing the Chief Justice is entitled to express a personal view on what he witnessed during recent institutional visits.
Mr Cudjoe’s intervention responds to the controversy that erupted after Justice Baffoe-Bonnie, during visits to the Minerals Income Investment Fund and the Social Security and National Insurance Trust on Wednesday, September 2, 2026, praised the performance of both institutions under the current administration and wondered aloud how Ghana could have sunk so low in the years before it.
Mr Cudjoe opened with a direct challenge to those questioning whether the Chief Justice should have spoken at all. “Is he not human? Is he not breathing the same air we both breathe?” he asked. “What makes him less qualified to express a view publicly about the astonishing level of decadence and massive incompetence, with catastrophic and deadly outcomes?”
He pointed to specific economic consequences he attributed to the period Baffoe-Bonnie’s remarks referenced, citing the Domestic Debt Exchange Programme haircuts, a fully achieved junk-rated economy, and Ghana’s exclusion from the international capital market as the kind of outcomes he believes justify the Chief Justice’s astonishment.
He extended the argument further, asking rhetorically whether the Chief Justice is somehow disqualified from recognising good governance when he encounters it. “Doesn’t he see and experience what good governance is?” he asked.
Not a Pattern, But a Reaction to What He Saw
Mr Cudjoe pushed back specifically against the suggestion that Justice Baffoe-Bonnie had made a habit of political commentary, framing the remarks instead as a spontaneous reaction to a specific set of facts encountered during an official visit. “It is not as if he goes about saying these hard truths every day or when he sits in court,” he said.
He described the circumstances that produced the remarks in detail, characterising them as the product of direct exposure to institutional dysfunction rather than a calculated political statement.
Justice Baffoe-Bonnie was on a working visit of public agencies, Cudjoe said, and having been educated about the harrowing man-made evils certain damaging directors of the erstwhile administration curated, cultured and ingrained in the institutions, he was awestruck, felt surreal, and then spoke from his heart and his head.
“Leave the CJ Alone”
Mr Cudjoe closed with a short, direct appeal that doubled as the piece’s central argument. “Leave the CJ alone,” he wrote, positioning the remark as both a defence of Baffoe-Bonnie’s right to react honestly to what he witnessed and a rebuke of critics who have treated the comments as an overstep of judicial propriety.
Mr Cudjoe’s defence adds a prominent voice to a debate that has otherwise split along different lines, with Ofoase-Ayirebi MP Kojo Oppong Nkrumah questioning the propriety of the Chief Justice’s institutional visits altogether.
Also, legal scholar Professor Stephen Kwaku Asare has cautioned that the specific phrase “the past eight years” carries unavoidable partisan meaning regardless of the Chief Justice’s intent, and NEIP Chief Executive Officer Eric Adjei separately defended the remarks as an honest citizen’s assessment.
Mr Cudjoe’s intervention goes further than Adjei’s defence, framing the remarks not merely as permissible but as an entirely natural human reaction that critics have no standing to police.
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