Akilagpa Sawyerr, Professor of Law, Barrister at Law, Lincoln's Inn, and Barrister at Law & Solicitor of the Supreme Courts of Ghana and of Papua New Guinea, you were elected and inducted into the Fellowship of the Ghana Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1992. Your reputation as a public intellectual preceded your arrival. In the years following your induction, the work of the Academy has been enriched by the special gifts and skills you have accumulated and cultivated from your many years of dedicated service to a wide range of national and international committees, boards, projects and organisations, many of which you have served as an executive member, often as chair or president. In all these engagements, you draw on your fine training in the complexities of the Jaw and a broad-based humanistic education to bring sensible solutions to challenging problems. For instance, as Chief Negotiator for the Government of Ghana in the Ghana-Valeo Negotiations (1983-1985 and 1988-1990, you Jed a team of brilliant public spirited intellectuals to save Ghana from further injury to her economic fortunes as a result of what was often cited as one of the most unfair industrial agreements between the global north and the global south.

Debates within the Academy have been greatly facilitated by your incisive interventions. Four major lectures delivered by you stand out for the boldness of the vision that informs them and the intellectual force and clarity of their basic arguments. In your 2015 inaugural Presidential Address titled "Thinking Our Way To Social Fulfilment: The Place of a Learned Society", you begin with a general comment on "knowledge, its sources and location" and make us sit up by locating "the family, the home, the community and its traditions" as the foundational and enduring sources of"awareness, identity and value." This is contrary to the common assumption that formal institutions of learning constitute the foundation of knowledge. Your 2016 Presidential Address titled "MARCffiNG FORWARD TO THE PAST: From Newmont II, back to Newmont I - via Gold Fields" reports briefly on "a vigorous exercise to rethink and re-vision the Academy, its ways of work and its relations with its stakeholders and society generally." The main elements of this drive, under your leadership, included the strengthening of the Academy to undertake and manage funded research projects, the development of structured relations with relevant public agencies and other stakeholder bodies and the initiation of a National Dialogues series, to provide platforms for the informed discussion of critical national and global issues. In your 1995 Inaugural Lecture "titled" you reminded us of the benefits of the significant investments made in university education 4/5/22, 12:35 PM Home - akisawyerr.com https://www.akisawyerr.com 35/90 during the years of independence, across Africa, also noting the fact that "learning at the highest levels has been known to Africa for over two thousand years", at least a thousand years earlier than the oldest centres of higher learning in Europe, such as Bologna and Heidelberg. Finally, in your November 27, 2006 Kwame Nkrumah Memorial Lecture, you focused on "the role of vision and committed leadership in holistic national development, drawing on a review of selected aspects of the life and times of Kwame Nkrumah".

In these lectures, and in your many other contributions to public discourse, one thing is clear; your total dedication to a productive interconnection between intellectual endeavor and the welfare of society at large. You always speak truth clearly, firmly, with little flourish or fanfare. Often we have to strain our ears to hear you, reminding us that public discourse need not be conducted with so much screaming. Your passion to be an attorney for Truth is remarkable, and you do so with admirable care, especially in dealing with Truth that hurts, Truth that carries a sense of shame. In your Kwame Nkrumah Memorial Lecture, you did not hesitate to remind Fellows of the Academy of a sore point in our history: "the fact that in helping the Academy to mark the memory of its Founder, Dr. Kwame Nkrumah, we are helping to right a wrong that was committed by the Academy forty years ago, when it terminated Dr. Nkrumah's Fellowship and removed him from the Presidency of the Academy, a body he had founded and on which he had lavished so much love and attention". Thank you, Professor Sawyerr, for your insistence on raising a point of order, when everyone is anxious to rush the discussion to a not too logical conclusion. Council and Fellows of the Ghana Academy of Arts and Sciences are proud of your countless distinguished accomplishments. We understand long life is a special blessing in your family. May you live long, and in Good Health.