Parliamentary leaders call for constitutional review • To limit presidential powers

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Limit Powers (Pol)

Parliamentary leaders call for
constitutional review
• To limit presidential powers

Story: Donald Ato Dapatem

Both the Minority and Majority leaders of Parliament have called for an urgent constitutional review to limit some of the powers of the President and empower Parliament to effectively play its role as the legislator and the keeper of the public purse.
They both claimed that the enormous powers conferred on the President had made the presidency a “constitutional monster”.
Mr Alban Sumana Bagbin and Mr Osei Kyei-Mensah-Bonsu raised these issues in separate contributions at a public lecture organised by the National Commission for Civic Education (NCCE) as part of activities marking this year’s 9th Constitution Week. It was on the theme, “Building a new political culture for ensuring government accountability”.
According to Mr Bagbin, although Parliament had been given the mandate to make laws, the current constitutional arrangements had snatched such powers from the House and placed them in the hands of the executive.
He explained that as the case was, the lawmakers could not on their own make any law with financial implications.
Since almost all legislation had financial implication, this had resulted in Parliament being paralysed as far as law making was concerned.
He said Parliament had to wait for the executive to initiate legislation for passage.
Mr Bagbin added that when budget estimates were brought before the House, the least the Parliamentarians could do was to question and comment on it, explaining that the House could not do anything about how the resources were distributed and to which institutions.
On his part, the Minority Leader said “the 1992 constitution has created a constitutional monster because the President had been given enormous powers”.
He said it was high time the constitution was reviewed with the view to correcting the anomaly because with even the power of making numerous appointments and firing, no one could question the President’s authority.
He said another worrying development was that in both the 2008 and 2009 budget, it was detected during the debate and approval, that the Electoral Commission (EC) was provided with resources to undertake HIV/AIDS campaign.
Ironically, he said, such an activity was within the ambit of the NCCE, because it was the institution that had the mandate and capacity to undertake such exercise.
The two also expressed grave concern about the increasing and devastating rate at which money was creeping into the political campaign and playing a major role in the determination of winners of elections in the country.
According to the Majority Leader, comparatively, his budget for his constituency elections from 1992, 1996, 2000, 2004 to 2008 had been increasing astronomically that the banks that he took loans from had been reminding him of his failure to pay.
He said the trend had the propensity to block his willingness to contest the 2012 parliamentary elections, adding that “we want to serve our nation but we are being saddled with debt”.
Mr Kyei-Mensah-Bonsu said the huge financial investment needed in recent politics was a recipe for disaster “because there is no Father Christmas in politics and that is the beginning of corruption”.
He said during the 2008 elections the billboard mounted by each of the presidential candidates of the National Democratic Congress (NDC), New Patriotic Party (NPP) and the Convention People’s Party (CPP) in his constituency were more expensive and bigger than what he had.
He said considering the fact that these three candidates replicated the mounting of all these huge billboards throughout the country, it meant that they used huge sums of money in this exercise.
Another point that the two leaders agreed on was the need to provide adequate resources for the NCCE and other independent governance institutions that have been mandated to undertake certain constitutional assignments.
Mr Bagbin noted with concern that an important governance institution such as the NCCE had been allowed to become weak over the years rendering it incapable of educating the people about their rights and responsibilities.
He said with the readiness of the President to review sections of the constitution, some of the review might demand referendum and that meant that the people must be educated about the issues and the need to vote massively on such issues.
The Minority Leader said most of the work Members of Parliament (MPs) undertake in their respective constituencies could be easily undertaken by the NCCE, especially issues bothering on governance and civic education.