Private legal practitioner and activist, Oliver Barker-Vormawor, has asserted that the Operation Recover All Loot (ORAL) Committee will not succeed unless bold reforms are undertaken in the judiciary.
In a post shared on his X page on Monday, September 8, 2025, Baker-Vormawor warned that the courts are congested with cases, and the bureaucracy surrounding plea bargaining system risks crippling ORAL’s mandate.
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“Our court system is clogged by thousands of cases that could have been pleaded out. A vast amount of prosecutorial resources are being spent on cases that should not go the full length of trial. In the end, cases delay, prosecutors are overworked, and worse, serious white-collar crime is not effectively prosecuted,” he wrote.
Barker-Vormawor also emphasised the need to make plea bargains a mandatory part of all offences.
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“First, instead of making plea bargains optional, they must be made a mandatory aspect of all offences. Second, the current approach is too cumbersome. Writing a letter and waiting for a response from AG is like waiting for God to add a daughter to his only begotten son,” he noted.
The activist further noted that in some jurisdictions, plea bargains are struck swiftly and seamlessly.
“In many jurisdictions, plea bargains are conducted fluidly. A sidebar conversation and agreement with a prosecutor, who then gets approval from a supervising officer, and you file the paperwork jointly before a judge. So seamless. A plea can be struck just the morning before arraignment,” he explained.
Barker-Vormawor however pointed out that in Ghana the process is fraught with unnecessary bureaucracies.
“Your letter goes to the Attorney General after being stuck at the registry for six months. The AG then minutes on it to the DPP, the DPP minutes on it to the Chief State Attorney, who minutes on it to the assigned State Attorney. The State Attorney writes a memo, which goes up the same chain again. Then when agreed, a letter is written to the lawyer for the accused, following the same up and down bureaucracy.
“If the lawyer wants a different deal, then we go through the same system for 18 months. Even you have 1000 prosecutors it will never feel enough because too much time is wasted on frivolities and incessant bureaucracies. No wonder ORAL is bogged down. It is not necessarily a lack of will. It is the tragedy of doing the same things over and over and expecting different results,” he added.
The ORAL Committee, established on December 18, 2024, by President John Dramani Mahama, was tasked with identifying and retrieving looted state
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