The Post in Question
News that the Minority Leader, Alexander Afenyo-Markin, was suing Sammy Gyamfi and the Multimedia Group Limited for defamation over the GoldBod Chief Executive’s reckless insults and bogus allegations directed at the Effutu MP first broke on 24 August 2026, the same day he announced it in a speech on the floor of Parliament welcoming MPs back from recess for a short Emergency Meeting called by the Speaker. The writ itself, seeking GH¢15 million in compensation, was issued that same day, 24 August 2026.
Three days later, on 27 August, Beatrice Annan took to Facebook to mock him. Her post asked, with evident sarcasm: “Why has Afenyo Markins still not served Sammy Gyamfi with his writ? Are the bailiffs on strike or leave? Who say man no dey.” At the time of writing this reply, the post had attracted over 320 comments and more than a thousand reactions.
The day before that, on 26 August, Mrs Annan had shared a post by “Voice of Concern” quoting the IEA’s Director of Research, Prof Alexander Bilson Darku, as saying that GoldBod’s reported $1.7 billion loss “largely reflects accounting and valuation effects rather than actual money lost by Ghana.” She appended just five words of her own: “Kindly tag the Minority Leader for me.”
Taken together, the two posts paint a picture of someone on a mission to mock the Minority Leader rather than to engage seriously with either the law or the economics she has chosen to comment on. That mission has come at the cost of accuracy on both fronts, and, as will become clear, at the cost of her own time being spent where it would do Ghanaians far more good.
First, the Facts: Three Days, Not “Never”
For the avoidance of doubt, the writ of summons in Osahen Alexander Afenyo-Markin v Samuel Adu Gyamfi and Multimedia Group Limited was issued from DehyenaChambers and filed at the High Court, General Jurisdiction, Accra, on 24 August 2026. That is a matter of record on the face of the writ itself, which bears the Registrar’s stamp. By the time Mrs Annan posted her jibe on 27 August, three days had passed since both the writ was issued and the news of it first broke in Parliament.
Three days. That is the entire factual basis for a Facebook post accusing a sitting Minority Leader, through thinly veiled sarcasm, of having filed an empty threat. It is worth pausing on how little that is, set against the machinery of civil litigation in Ghana.
The Law: Service Is the Business of the Bailiff, Not the Litigant
Order 7, rule 1 of the High Court (Civil Procedure) Rules, 2004 (C.I. 47) could not be plainer:
“A document which is required to be served on a person shall be served by a bailiff of the Court or a process server registered with the Court; but a party may direct the service.”
Three things follow, none of which Mrs Annan’s post reflects.
First , service is a court function, not a personal errand. It is the bailiff of the High Court, or a process server registered with the Court, who effects service, not Mr Afenyo-Markin, and not his lawyers standing over the defendant with a copy of the writ in hand. Interestingly, the writ itself confirms this precisely. On its face, immediately beneath the parties’ particulars, it is expressly endorsed: “(PLAINTIFFS SHALL DIRECT SERVICE ON THE DEFENDANTS)”. That endorsement tracks the language of Order 7, rule 1 exactly. It records that the plaintiff’s lawyers will direct the process server, not that the plaintiff will himself deliver the document. Mrs Annan’s post treats “who say man no dey” as though the Minority Leader were expected to personally hand Mr Gyamfi the writ. That is not how service works, and the very document she is commenting on says so in black and white. One struggles to decide which is worse: that she never knew this basic rule of civil procedure, or that she knew it once, at law school, and simply could not be bothered to refresh her memory before broadcasting her ignorance to over a thousand people.
Second , a party “directing” service is not the same as a party performing it. All Order 7, rule 1 permits is that a party, through his lawyers, may specify the manner of service, for instance deploying personal service under Order 7, rule 2, or applying for substituted service under Order 7, rule 6 where a defendant is proving difficult to locate. It does not turn the plaintiff into his own bailiff.
Third , the timing here is entirely unremarkable. Under Order 2, rule 9(1) of C.I. 47, a writ of summons is valid for service for twelve calendar months from the date of issue, a fact the writ itself recites in its own notice to the defendant. Three days after issue is not a delay in any sense the Rules recognise. Bailiffs must locate a defendant whose address is, on the face of the writ, recorded as “House No. Unknown, Accra.” Where personal service proves genuinely difficult, the plaintiff’s lawyers may in due course invoke substituted service. None of this happens overnight, and certainly not within three days of filing.
A Cardinal Duty Before Speaking
Mrs Annan does not present herself as an ordinary commentator. She parades herself, across media houses, as a “lawyer’s lawyer,” a tag she appears to relish. That self-styled status carries a cardinal duty: anyone who steps into public debate on a legal matter, and does so with such evident relish for mockery, owes the public at least a working knowledge of the rules she is purporting to comment on. Ignorance is not a neutral position when broadcast to over a thousand people who reacted to her post and 320 more who commented on it. It actively misinforms them about how the courts of this country function.
Order 7 of C.I. 47 is not obscure. It runs to a handful of short rules. Reading rule 1 alone, one sentence, would have spared Mrs Annan the embarrassment of suggesting that a litigant’s lawyers deliberately withheld a writ that had, at the point of her post, only just left the printer three days earlier. It is a curious kind of “lawyer’s lawyer” who cannot be bothered to open the very rulebook she built a media profile on, before mocking a colleague at the Bar for exercising his right to sue.
The Second Post Fares No Better, and the Timing Is Telling
Mrs Annan’s earlier post is equally telling, and not only for its content. She shared the IEA Director of Research’s recent view that GoldBod’s reported loss was largely an accounting and valuation effect, tagged with an invitation for others to “tag the Minority Leader for me,” as though a single economist’s characterisation of the loss settles the matter and renders the Minority’s concerns frivolous.
It does not, and the timing of her second post makes that point for her. Her 27 August mockery of the Minority Leader’s writ landed on the very same day that Abena Osei-Asare, MP for Atiwa East, Chair of Parliament’s Public Accounts Committee, and a banker and chartered accountant by training, published fresh findings pressing GoldBod for further and better particulars on the very same $1.7 billion loss. In a detailed Facebook statement on GoldBod’s 2025 accounts, Mrs Osei-Asare set out what she called an unanswered question over GH¢4.5477 billion in government funds. She noted that GoldBod’s own Business Review described the sum as revolving trade capital, yet the accounts recognised the identical amount as grant revenue folded into a reported surplus, while elsewhere in the same report GoldBod described it as unutilised subvention still sitting at the Bank of Ghana at year end. She went on to invoke IPSAS 1’s requirement that financial statements reflect the true substance of transactions, IPSAS 23’s treatment of government transfers, and sections 79, 82 and 93 of the Public Financial Management Act, 2016 (Act 921), before calling on GoldBod’s directors to reconcile the inconsistent figures and on the Auditor General to release the audit’s Management Letter.
That is a serious, technically grounded intervention from the chair of the very committee constitutionally tasked with scrutinising public accounts, published the same day Mrs Annan chose instead to relitigate a single IEA soundbite and lob a Facebook jibe at the Minority Leader over his lawyers’ conduct of a private lawsuit. It rather underscores the point: the Minority’s concerns about GoldBod are not resolved by one economist’s characterisation of accounting effects. They are, if anything, deepening, with a chartered accountant on the Public Accounts Committee now asking pointed questions about how GH¢4.5477 billion of public money came to be booked as revenue in the first place.
Nor is the IEA the only economic voice on the subject. The IMF’s Resident Representative and a range of other economists have offered their own, sometimes markedly different, assessments of the GoldBod losses. An informed commentator genuinely interested in the substance, rather than in scoring a point against the Minority Leader, would have engaged with that fuller picture, Mrs Osei-Asare’s findings included, before reaching for a single quotation to settle the argument.
Where Her Time Would Be Better Spent
There is a further point worth making plainly. Mrs Annan is not simply a private citizen with an opinion. She is a Presidential Staffer and, by her own public profile, a member of the Board of the Bank of Ghana, the very institution for which GoldBod operates the Domestic Gold Purchase Programme as an agent. Ghanaians would be far better served if she applied that dual vantage point to ensuring the Programme is run responsibly and at the lowest achievable cost to the public purse, rather than to mocking the Leader of the Opposition in Parliament over the pace of process service in a private lawsuit.
A loss of $1.7 billion in a single year is not a trivial sum to wave away as mere accounting and valuation effect. President Mahama himself has said his government needs a broadly comparable amount to complete the Agenda 111 Hospitals, a project begun under the previous NPP administration that has stalled under the current NDC administration. Set against that need, a board member of the Bank of Ghana would do the country a greater service by turning her attention, and her platform, toward ensuring the Domestic Gold Purchase Programme is managed prudently going forward, rather than toward unintelligent Facebook jibes aimed at the Minority who is asking the questions.
Why This Matters
Mrs Annan’s post is not harmless banter. It is a public figure, one who trades on a reputation for legal fluency, using that reputation to suggest to the public that a serious defamation claim is theatre, built on nothing more than her own unfamiliarity with how the Court’s bailiff system operates and applied to a writ that was, at the time, only three days old. Litigants who take the entirely proper step of filing a writ through their lawyers do not deserve to have the ordinary, unremarkable pace of civil process weaponised against them as evidence of insincerity, still less within three days of filing.
If Mrs Annan wishes to debate the merits of the defamation suit itself, whether the reckless insults and bogus allegations were fair or actionable, or the substance of the GoldBod losses, those are legitimate public debates. But dressing up a misreading of Order 7 as a devastating “gotcha” about bailiffs “on strike or leave,” and dismissing a live parliamentary inquiry on the strength of one quotation while a chartered accountant on the Public Accounts Committee is asking harder questions the same day, does a disservice to public understanding on both fronts.
A little humility, and the time it takes to read one rule of C.I. 47 or Mrs Osei-Asare’s actual findings, would have spared her this. The rules are public. The writ itself, endorsed “plaintiffs shall direct service on the defendants,” settles the point in her own source material. It took less time to read than it did to write the post. For someone who wears the “lawyer’s lawyer” tag as a badge from studio to studio, that is not a small failing. It is the difference between commentary and performance, and on this occasion, Mrs Annan chose performance over homework.
By Ebenezer Narh Ogyatey | Final year law student, University of Buckingham, 82 Harris Hiuse, M18 1AD, UK | enarhogyatey@gmail.com
