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Private legal practitioner Martin Kpebu has said that the Office of the Special Prosecutor (OSP) is needed and must be allowed to remain.
He says his issues with the OSP have to do with the occupant, the current Special Prosecutor, Kissi Agyebeng, who he believes has not performed as expected.
“We need the Office of the Special Prosecutor. Now, questions are being raised because of the conduct of the current occupant of the office,” he said on TV3 on Thursday, April 9.
On the suit challenging the powers of the OSP to prosecute without authorisation from the Attorney-General, Kpebu said, “If we have to take OSP briefs to the A-G before the OSP goes to prosecute, then it will also create a problem. It will draw us back.”
Similarly, the Chairman of the Constitutional Review Committee, Professor H. Kwasi Prempeh, has made a case for the Office of the Special Prosecutor (OSP) to be allowed to defend the suit challenging its powers to prosecute without the Attorney-General’s authorisation.
He made the point that refusing to allow the OSP to defend this suit and, instead, allowing the Attorney-General to go to court in the person of Deputy Attorney-General, Justice Srem Sai, in the position of nominal defendant, to advance a position in agreement with the plaintiff’s, makes a mockery of Ghana’s adversarial system of justice.
In a Facebook post, he said, “So the Supreme Court of Ghana will not allow the ‘real party in interest,’ the OSP in this case, to defend against a lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of its statutory establishment and existence, but will allow the ‘nominal defendant’, the AG, whose position and interest in the suit is not adverse to that of the plaintiff, to file a purported defence that agrees with the position of the plaintiff.
“The Court is essentially privileging ‘form over substance’ and encouraging collusive suits or ‘sham cases’, where, as in this case, the AG and the private plaintiff are, in both law and fact, on the same side of the matter. This is not how litigation or adjudication in the common law tradition is supposed to work: the two sides to the suit must have truly adverse interests and positions and, thus, the incentive to plead and advance their rival legal positions with genuine zeal, enabling the Court, as impartial referee, to have the best possible legal arguments from both sides to inform and determine its final decision in the case.
“Refusing to allow the OSP to defend this suit by plaintiff Noah E. Tetteh and, instead, allowing the AG to come to court in the person of Deputy AG, Justice Sai, in the position of nominal defendant, to advance a position in agreement with the plaintiff’s makes a mockery of our adversarial system of justice. Let the OSP defend this suit. The law is not an ass. Or maybe it is.”
The Office of the Attorney-General (AG) has responded to a constitutional writ at the Supreme Court with arguments that seek to strike out portions of the Office of the Special Prosecutor (OSP) Act, 2017 (Act 959), that grant the OSP independent prosecutorial authority.
In an affidavit filed on Wednesday, April 8, 2026, in the case of Adamtey v. Attorney-General, the state’s chief legal adviser argued that the current legal framework allowing the Special Prosecutor to initiate criminal proceedings without the express authorisation of the Attorney-General is a direct violation of the 1992 Constitution.
Article 88 of the Constitution, which vests all prosecutorial powers of the Republic in the Attorney-General, is at the heart of the suit.
The AG contends that while the OSP was established to fight corruption, it cannot function as a “parallel state” with powers that bypass the constitutional oversight of the Attorney-General.
The substantive case involves private citizen Noah Ephraem Tetteh Adamtey, who is challenging the constitutionality of Act 959, which governs the OSP’s independent operations.
Story by Nana Ekuah
Loco tv