Imprisonment: Tsatsu Tsikata says he chose forgiveness over bitterness
He made the remarks on Wednesday, 15 April 2026, at the UPSA Law School honourific lecture and awards ceremony, where his career and lifetime contributions to the legal profession were being celebrated.
Veteran lawyer Tsatsu Tsikata has said he bears no personal grudge against those he believes were involved in the events that led to his imprisonment during the era of former President John Agyekum Kufuor.
He made the remarks on Wednesday, 15 April 2026, at the UPSA Law School honourific lecture and awards ceremony, where his career and lifetime contributions to the legal profession were being celebrated.
Speaking reflectively about one of the most controversial episodes in his public life, Tsikata said he had made a conscious decision not to be consumed by resentment. In his words, he has not allowed what happened to him to harden into bitterness.
That personal forgiveness, however, did not stop him from condemning the injustice of the experience itself.
He said no one, irrespective of political affiliation, should be subjected to the kind of treatment he endured. He particularly objected to what he described as the misuse of state power in ways that violate both justice and human dignity, including arrests carried out in deeply personal or sacred spaces.
His comments revisit a case that has remained one of the most disputed legal and political matters in Ghana’s recent history.
In 2008, Tsikata was convicted by an Accra Fast Track High Court in relation to a loan guarantee he had approved in the 1990s while serving as Chief Executive of the Ghana National Petroleum Corporation. He was found guilty of causing financial loss to the state and sentenced to five years in prison.
He served part of that sentence at Nsawam before receiving a presidential pardon in 2009 from President John Evans Atta Mills.
The following year, the Supreme Court overturned the conviction, finding that the proceedings had been fundamentally flawed and amounted to a miscarriage of justice.
At the ceremony in Accra, Tsikata’s remarks suggested that while the legal wrong done to him remains significant in public memory, he has chosen to respond to it not with vengeance, but with restraint.
