The Constitutional Reform Ghanaians Really Need
Dec. 29, 2014
The 2016 Presidential Candidate of the New Patriotic Party (NPP) has been bitterly complaining about the deliberate pussyfooting of the Electoral Commission (EC) on the critical question of electoral reforms (See “EC’s Reforms Won’t Be Comprehensive – Akufo-Addo” Citifmonline.com / Ghanaweb.com 12/29/14). The reforms that Nana Akufo-Addo is referring to were among recommendations issued by the Atuguba-presided panel of Supreme Court judges that presided over the 2012 Presidential Election Petition launched by Messrs. Akufo-Addo, Bawumia and Obetsebi-Lamptey. Among the reforms that the three-time Presidential Candidate of the New Patriotic Party would have promptly undertaken by the EC is a new voters’ register.
Nana Akufo-Addo firmly believes that the present voters’ register is bloated with ineligible and ghost voters. It may also well contain the names of foreigners, particularly citizens from neighboring countries, and underage Ghanaian citizens. Currently, the Afari-Gyan-headed Electoral Commission claims that it is in the process of self-reformation. But Nana Akufo-Addo believes that the Atuguba-headed Supreme Court panel ought to have recommended the establishment of an independent supervisory body to ensure that at least the salient aspects of the needed reforms were effected well ahead of the December 2016 general election.
The former New Patriotic Party Member of Parliament for Akyem-Abuakwa South, however, is quick to point out that the 1992 Constitution, as it presently stands, does not allow for the establishment of such an independent body, which would have been composed of representatives from all legitimately registered political parties as well as representatives of the Electoral Commission. And so, perhaps, what Nana Akufo-Addo ought to be doing presently is to be lobying Parliament to amend the Constitution in order to ensure the functional enhancement of the country’s democratic culture. This, of course, is not likely to be a cake-walk, in American folk parlance, for Parliament has yet to convincingly demonstrate that it has “bite-able” teeth.
Recently, for example, when President John Dramani Mahama unilaterally decided to cut the 2015 budgetary allocation of the House by a whopping 30-percent, he had the ready complicity of Speaker Edward Doe Adjaho and Mr. Alban S. K. Bagbin, the Parliamentary Majority Leader. And all that the rest of the membership of the House could do was huff and puff and wistfully whine like some disgruntled schoolboys and girls. Meanwhile, it had just been widely reported by the media that the President and his staff had overspent their 2015 budgetary allocation by twice as much or a humongous one-hundred-percent. Indeed, as yours truly pointed out then, it was almost as if the members of the House were being spitefully punished by proxy. Now, if this is not a curious proposition, I don’t know what else it is.
For my part, though, I think the focus has to be placed squarely on the number of people represented by each member of parliament. The 1992 clearly stipulates that each parliamentary constituency ought to contain at least 50,000 (Fifty-Thousand) Ghanaian citizens. Nana Akufo-Addo and the leading members and operatives of the New Patriotic Party ought to ensure that this stipulation is strictly followed throughout the country. What this means is that some regions will have their number of parliamentary representatives proportionately and significantly reduced. No group of Ghanaians in any part of the country is worth more than any other group, especially where the number of people being represented in parliament falls far short of the constitutional stipulation.
It is democratically criminal, for instance, to have the combined total of citizens who voted for New Patriotic Party parliamentarians being far in excess of those who voted for the National Democratic Congress (NDC), and yet coming up with a situation in which the NDC has significantly more seats in parliament than the NPP. Democracy is about equal representation, not the criminal shortchanging of the numerical majority.
By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.
Garden City, New York
E-mail: [email protected]
