Tribute to the late Dr Acquaah-Gaisie

I pay tribute to my friend and fellow academic in Australia Dr Gerard Ansem Acquaah-Gaisie

I met Gerard in the early 80s then PhD candidate in Criminology at Melbourne university where I was teaching.

Upon graduation Gerard taught law on the Clayton campus of Monash university and later on the Gippsland campus where I last saw him with my family after a soccer match in the La trobe Valley where my son played. At that last meeting Gerard mentioned health issues which he has now succumbed to while in Ghana in April this year.

I remember Gerard as a gentle giant — so meek, so affable, so jovial you would never have guessed he was the head of Prisons in Ghana from 1981 to 1983 before coming to Australia.

The circumstances of his leaving Ghana made those personal attributes baffling. He got wind that the Rawlings regime was after him over poorly explained favours to inmates imprisoned by the regime, sought refuge in the Australian High Commission in Accra which then arranged his exit to Australia. Those of that experience tended to be bitter – Gerald was not; tended to be extremely politically skewed – Gerard was not and if anything maintained Nkrumaist ideals, no doubt as his mentor and friend Dr Ge Graft Johnson VP to Limann. Gerard upheld the Dalai Lama’s admonition against destructive emotions, he was after all entitled to feel bitter as a result of events that truncated his career at its most rewarding peak.

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Two personal experiences with him in 1985 summed up my view of Gerard which remained for 30 years up to the last i visited him.

• The first was over a conversation in which I suggested prisoners in Ghana should be put to work as a more practical way of them paying back to society… His response was on human rights of the prisoners. He said the courts that sentenced prisoners prescribed the rights prisoners should forgo e.g. limits on freedom of movement etc and that prisoners could not be treated as slaves and that their community work must be done within reasonable limits. When he saw the expression on my face in response to his answer, he joked — “some of the prisoners sentenced to hard labour are so fragile that if we put them to hard labour they would die in our hands “.

• The second was when he asked me to read his draft PhD thesis and offer any suggestions I may have. The two gems in the thesis were: situating state corruption within the tenets of human rights law – that state corruption was a violation of the human rights of the citizenry; the other was justification of military take over if satisfying conditions of Marshall law,  namely temporary seizure of power to address an emergency that civil or elected governments could not or were unwillingly to address.

Gerard would remain with me as a most principled and valuable Ghanaian whose talent like many others were lost to Ghana as a result of the political turmoils of our times.

My wife Kate and our children join me in extending our sincere and heartfelt condolences to the surviving relations of Gerard and pray God’s blessings in his passage to restful peace

George Kweifio-Okai