Speaking in the Name of the Republic: Responsibility, Machinery and the Constitutional Settlement of Prosecutorial Authority in Noah Ephraem Tetteh Adamtey v Attorney-General

There is a further way of understanding the distinction which the Court did not use but which fits the Ghanaian setting more naturally than the English authorities do. In Akan political thought, an office is not owned by the person who occupies it. The stool is greater than the occupant; the occupant is enstooled to serve a community which existed before him and will outlast him, and the authority he exercises is held in trust rather than by title. Kwame Gyekye’s account of moderate communitarianism captures the same structure in philosophical terms, insisting that the individual officeholder is neither swallowed by the community nor set above it, but stands within a web of obligations which give his authority both its content and its limits.