ZOGLI AND ANOTHER v. GANYO

JUDGMENT OF AMISSAH J.A.

The original claim of the respondent, Daniel Kodzo Ganyo, was for £G100 or ¢200.00. It was brought before the local court. That was in 1966. The local court magistrate after hearing the evidence gave judgment for the respondent and awarded him fifty guineas or ¢105.00 damages against the first appellant. The appellants appealed to the circuit court. That court, while dismissing their appeal as to the liability of the first appellant, altered the damages. In the view of Judge Apatu Plange, who dealt with the case, the issue between the parties having previously been disposed of by an arbitration, it was not open to the local court magistrate to award damages different from what had been awarded at the arbitration.

Accordingly, he reversed the order as to damages. The arbitration award, if it is accepted that there was an arbitration, was for ¢40.00, one live sheep, half a piece of calico and a bottle of schnapps. The judge's order substituted this for the order of the local court. The appellants still being dissatisfied have appealed to this court.

Only a point of principle of considerable importance could have brought them this far on such a subject-matter, seeing that what they stand to lose whether they win this appeal or not could be far in excess of what they insist they are being asked wrongfully to pay by the lower courts.

Even though the record shows that there are two appellants, I will from now on limit my references to that side of the dispute to the first appellant (whom I shall describe as the "appellant") as the orders of the two courts were against him alone. The complaint of the appellant before us was that there was no arbitration between the parties, the award of which the circuit judge could legitimately say that he was obliged to give effect to. But that there was a meeting between the respondent and the appellant in the presence of a third party in an effort to resolve the differences between the parties is not in dispute.

A daughter of the respondent once had a quarrel with the appellant's son who was the second defendant in the case. Both youngsters were school-children. They and their parents lived in a rural community in the Tepa area in Ashanti. The quarrel took place at the school. In the course of that quarrel, the appellant's son had said some very defamatory things about the respondent and his wife to their daughter. She was, according to the appellant's son, not the daughter of the respondent at a