Tsatsu Tsikata

Tsatsu Tsikata is a lawyer and legal scholar who ran the Ghana National Petroleum Corporation for twelve years and is the National Democratic Congress's leading courtroom advocate. He was born in Keta on 1 October 1950 and grew up in Adabraka, Accra.

A precocious scholar

He entered Mfantsipim School at nine on a scholarship and the University of Ghana at fourteen, graduating with a first-class law degree at eighteen. He then took a first-class Bachelor of Civil Law at Oxford and held a junior research fellowship at Corpus Christi College before returning in 1974 to lecture at the University of Ghana, where his students included Alban Bagbin and several future Supreme Court justices.

GNPC and the courts

From 1988 to 2000 he was chief executive of GNPC. Under the Kufuor government he was tried for causing financial loss to the state; after a six-year trial he was convicted in June 2008 and jailed. He rejected the pardon President Kufuor offered on his last day in office, appealed, and was acquitted by the Court of Appeal in November 2016.

As counsel he defended Jerry Rawlings in the 1979 treason trial, led the NDC's case in the 2012 election petition, and was lead counsel for John Mahama in the 2020 election petition. He is an elder of Asbury Dunwell Church in Accra.