Prof Vladimir Antwi-Danso, Dean of the Ghana Armed Forces Command and Staff College (GAFCSC), on Wednesday this week, called for the re-writing of a new Constitution because the currently one has outlived its usefulness.
We, however, disagreed with him and contended, using this column yesterday, that if his prescription was to be accepted, Ghana would be writing a new Constitution every 15 years.
We also argued that the Constitution only needed amendments, and not a whole new one. We, for instance, suggested an amendment that would restrict the President on the number of ministers to be appointed.
Interestingly, whilst Prof Antwi-Danso was calling for the drafting of a new Constitution, the Majority Leader, Osei-Kyei-Mensah-Bonsu, was also in Parliament calling for an amendment of the Constitution for the Speaker to be elected from amongst the Members of Parliament. This was on 30 years of Ghana’s democracy statement he delivered on the floor of the House on Wednesday.
According to him, Ghana is among the nine countries in the world where the Speaker of Parliament is appointed from outside, instead of from among the MPs. Though the Majority Leader has been an MP for close to 30 years and, therefore, has a lot of experience in parliamentary democracy, we still disagree with him.
What we should not gloss over is the fact that whereas the United Kingdom and other democratic countries practice a parliamentary system of government, ours is a hybrid one. We have adopted both the presidential and parliamentary system. In view of this, the wholesale importation of what is practised elsewhere into our system will not automatically resolve the problems Mr. Osei-Kyei-Mensa-Bonsu is seeking to cure.
Under the British parliamentary democracy, the MPs elect the Speaker from amongst their own ranks, but the caveat is that the Speaker does not take part in debates or voting, except to break ties; and even then, the convention is that the Speaker casts the tie-breaking vote according to Speaker Denison’s rule, which results either in further debates or a votes for the status quo.
Ghana currently has a hung parliament – this means a single vote from each side of the House is very important when it comes to the determination of an important national issue. One can, therefore, imagine what would happen if the Speaker is also an MP, but cannot vote to support his side in the House.
Since Britain, USA and other advanced countries have practiced democracy for centuries, we must be careful not to copy, hook line and sinker, some of their conventions, which can spell doom for us as a new democratic state. We all saw what happened in our Parliament last year when the First Deputy Speaker, Joseph Osei Owusu, decided to vote to support the Majority side during the Electronic Transaction Levy (E-levy) debate.
In our opinion, the current situation where the Speaker is selected from outside Parliament is the best practice that suits our democracy, and must, therefore, not be altered. Unless of course, in so doing, we allow the Speaker to also vote for his or her party if he or she feels the urge to do so. But the big question is that, is it fair for the Speaker to direct how debate should go and turn round to vote in a certain direction?
As we have already indicated, even in Britain, where the Speaker is appointed amongst the MPs, he or she does not participate in debate let alone vote. Upon the basis of this, we think the status quo must remain. Osei-Kyei-Mensa-Bonsu’s suggestion must be shelved for now.
