Name: Justice Also Known As: Equality Before the Law
Last Seen: Standing proudly beside Democracy, wearing a blindfold and carrying a scale.
Date Missing: No one can say for certain. The disappearance was gradual enough that few noticed the exact moment Justice left the room.
Suspected Circumstances of Disappearance
Justice was last seen, reliably and without delay, whenever an ordinary citizen was arrested for stealing food, livestock, or some other small item needed to survive the week. Witnesses describe it as present, alert, and thoroughly uncompromising on these occasions. The courts moved quickly. The verdicts came fast. The lesson was clear: the law does not sleep.
Curiously, whenever a case involving the powerful began to attract public attention, Justice grew difficult to locate. In its place appeared lengthy legal arguments, technical procedures, and a rotating cast of explanations so intricate that ordinary citizens were left wondering whether they had watched the same case everyone else was discussing, or a different one entirely, filmed in a different country, governed by different laws.
To be clear, no one is suggesting that the law should be ignored. Due process matters. Appeals matter. Technicalities exist for good reasons, and a nation that discards them in its haste to punish is a nation that has learned nothing from history. But due process is supposed to be a shield held over everyone equally. It is not supposed to be a private umbrella issued only to those who can afford the premium, or, as we shall see shortly, the airfare.
So the ordinary citizen is left to ask a simple question, the kind that does not require a law degree, only a working memory.
Why does Justice move with such remarkable speed in one neighbourhood, and lose its sense of direction entirely in another?
The poor man steals a fowl. Justice arrives before nightfall.
The struggling woman steals a basket of plantains to feed her children. Justice arrives, scales already balanced, verdict already written.
The unemployed youth steals to survive one more day. Justice arrives, swift and certain, unmoved by circumstance.
But when those entrusted with the resources of an entire nation are accused, prosecuted, or even convicted through the very legal process meant to hold them accountable, Justice develops an unusual habit. It takes what can only be described as extended leave, sometimes indefinite, and returns only after the public has grown tired of asking questions, distracted by the next scandal, or simply worn down by the exhausting choreography of committees, reviews, and further investigations.
Exhibit A: A Live Case File, Filed While We Wait
While compiling this report, investigators stumbled upon a case so perfectly illustrative of the pattern that we considered, briefly, whether it had been staged for our benefit. It had not. It is entirely real, and it is still unfolding.
In November 2025, Ghana’s Office of the Special Prosecutor charged the country’s former Finance Minister, along with seven others, on seventy-eight counts of corruption and related offences, allegations of procurement breaches, causing financial loss to the state, and using public office for personal gain. A serious case, by any measure, brought with considerable fanfare.
There was, however, one small complication. The former minister was already in the United States, having travelled there in early 2025 for medical treatment. His visa quietly expired some months later. He did not come home. Ghana’s Special Prosecutor requested an Interpol Red Notice, which was duly issued in mid-2025, only to be quietly withdrawn by Interpol itself less than a year later, after a review reportedly concluded the case looked rather more political than criminal. In June 2026, a United States immigration judge went further still, granting the former minister residency and stating, in effect, that the evidence against him did not hold up, citing the withdrawn Red Notice, an audit that found administrative weaknesses but no proven wrongdoing, and the small detail that Ghana’s own extradition request had made no meaningful progress in over a year.
The Special Prosecutor’s office insists, with admirable consistency, that none of this changes anything, that the warrant remains valid, that the former minister remains, officially, a fugitive from justice. Meanwhile, back home, the trial of his nine co-accused keeps being adjourned, partly because summons cannot easily be served on defendants who are, conveniently, somewhere else. Even more remarkably, officials from the ruling party’s own grassroots have begun publicly demanding that the Special Prosecutor and the Attorney-General explain, to the ordinary Ghanaian taxpayer, exactly what has been done with the considerable public money spent chasing a man who currently enjoys a valid American address.
Justice, it seems, filed the paperwork. It simply never boarded the flight.
A Note on Hypocrisy, Bipartisan and Beautifully Symmetrical
Here is where the investigation becomes genuinely fascinating, because both of our leading political parties have found a way to embarrass themselves equally, which is, in its own strange way, an achievement.
The party that once employed the former Finance Minister has been unusually restrained on the subject of his prolonged medical absence. This is the same party that, when a different case involving a different accused person collapsed on appeal, discovered a sudden and passionate devotion to the rule of law, announcing protests, decrying miscarriages of justice, and demanding accountability with the fervour of citizens who had just discovered the constitution for the first time. Yet regarding their own former minister, wanted on seventy-eight counts and currently residing comfortably abroad, the outrage has been curiously, almost professionally, muted.
Meanwhile, the party currently in government has spent considerable energy publicising its pursuit of this same former minister, treating each new headline as evidence of its commitment to accountability. And yet, more than a year after the charges were filed, the warrant remains unexecuted, the Red Notice has been withdrawn, and the man himself has just been granted permanent residency in the very country his extradition was meant to come from. Even members of the governing party’s own regional structures have begun asking, in public, on the radio, what exactly happened to the case they were assured was being handled with the utmost seriousness.
So here is the honest summary. One party is quiet about its own man’s convenient absence. The other party is loud about a pursuit it has not managed to complete. Both postures are, conveniently, easier to hold than the third option, actually finishing what accountability requires, regardless of which jersey the accused happens to be wearing.
Perhaps, then, the rest of us chose the wrong career.
Perhaps we should all have become politicians. Not necessarily to serve the people. Not necessarily to improve the nation. Simply to enjoy the quiet comfort of knowing that influence travels with a better class of legal umbrella whenever the storm begins to gather overhead, and, apparently, a rather good travel agent.
Meanwhile, the ordinary citizen is reminded, often sternly, that ignorance of the law is no excuse. And yet the powerful seem permanently surrounded by enough legal explanation to fill an entire library, most of it arriving conveniently after the fact, and increasingly, from a different time zone.
Other Missing Persons
The following values were last sighted in healthy, functioning democracies. They are now believed to be missing, and in some cases, presumed permanently relocated.
Equality Before the Law Accountability Integrity Public Trust Moral Leadership Transparency Public Service Conscience Shame Common Sense Extradition Paperwork, last seen circulating somewhere between Accra and Washington, still awaiting a signature
Investigators are increasingly confident that none of these values was kidnapped overnight. There was no single dramatic abduction, no one villain who can be named and blamed in isolation. They disappeared the way a nation’s savings disappear from a household account, one compromise at a time, one excuse at a time, one selectively applied law at a time, until one day the cupboard is bare and no one can quite explain how it happened.
The most fascinating detail in this whole investigation is that many of the very people entrusted to protect these values now stand before microphones expressing profound concern about their disappearance. They condemn the decline. They promise investigations. They mourn publicly, sometimes eloquently, alongside the rest of us, as though they had never once held a key to the room from which these values vanished.
And we are expected to applaud the performance.
We are expected to believe the concern.
Above all, we are expected to forget who was standing closest to the door when the lights went out, and who, more recently, was standing closest to the departure gate.
A Final Note
If anyone finds Justice, kindly return it to Democracy. It has been missing for far too long, and Democracy does not function well without it, no matter how convincingly the paperwork suggests otherwise.
Signed, A citizen who still believes that the law should protect the powerless as faithfully as it protects the powerful.
I may not be a lawyer, but at least I have common sense, and apparently, these days, that makes me the more qualified of the two.