Bagbin, Mahama and NDC Must Respect the Supreme Court – Part 2

He bloviates throughout his so-called “62-Point Statement” of a rejoinder to the Akufo-Addo Presidency. Which simply means that Speaker Alban SK Bagbin does not say much that instructively and/or constructively supports his rambling tirade and ineffectual attempt to lecture those who have actually lived, studied and worked in advanced and viable constitutional democracies for quite a considerably while. Here, of course, we are referring to both Messrs. Bediatuo Asante and Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo. In short, the Speaker of Ghana’s 8^th Parliament only ends up royally exposing himself and his partisan and ideological associates of the Parliamentary Minority Caucus of the country’s main opposition National Democratic Congress (NDC) for the veritable charlatans and reprehensible nation-wreckers that they unarguably are (See “Full Text: Bagbin’s 62-Point Statement on Akufo-Addo’s Position on Anti-LGBT+ Bill” Ghanaweb.com 3/21/24).

For starters, it is only the leadership of the National Democratic Congress, beginning with the late Chairman Jeremiah “Jerry” John Rawlings, leader of the erstwhile Provisional National Defense Council (PNDC) junta and, subsequently, the National Democratic Congress, that has established a politically unenviable track record of abducting and summarily executing Superior Court Judges, Mafia Style, as the globally celebrated members of the blue-ribbon Azu-Crabbe Commission emphatically stated in their Special Investigations Board (SIB) Report established by a strategically cornered Chairman Rawlings, in the wake of the PNDC-contracted midnight abduction and the brutal and morally despicable assassination of Justices Cecilia Koranteng-Addow, Frederick Poku-Sarkodie and Kwadwo Agyei Agyepong; and of course, the recently retired senior officer of the Ghana Armed Forces (GAF), to wit, Major Samuel “Sam” Acquah.

So, it is sheer wonder that the retired National Democratic Congress’ Member of Parliament for the Nadowli-Kaleo Constituency, in the Upper-West Region, would muster the chutzpah to lecture his far more ideologically progressive and enlightened opponents on the salient tenets of our Three-Arm Fourth Republican Democratic Culture. Perhaps it is perfectly in order here to underscore, at least for the benefit of our teeming audience of young readers and listeners, that it was the mischief-making and the unconscionable leaders of the National Democratic Congress, for the most part, who created the kind of democratically bastardized and functionally stultifying constitutional framework in which we currently find ourselves not being able to clearly delineate or differentiate the institutional establishments of the Executive branch of our government from its coordinate Legislative counterpart.

Which clearly makes Speaker Bagbin sound inescapably comical when he virulently accuses the President, Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo, of playing fast-and-loose with the discrete functions of the Presidency and the Legislature or Parliament. Maybe somebody needs to ask our infamous “Parliamentary Methuselah” just whatever happened to the Report of the Constitution Review Commission (CRC), established by the late President John Evans Atta “Woyome” Mills, many of whose findings were supposed to facilitate the salutary cleaning up of the unspeakable travesty that is the Indemnity-Clause hobbled Ghana’s 1992 Republican Constitution.

On the latter count also needs to be equally highlighted the fact that it was the immediate successor of the “mysteriously vanished” President Mills, namely, the Serial and the Dynastic Presidential Candidate of the National Democratic Congress, Mr. John “Ford Expedition Payola” Dramani Mahama, to whom the duty of implementing the aforesaid Constitution Review Commission Report had fallen. Predictably, the Bole-Bamboi native, from the Akufo-Addo-created Savannah Region, had done absolutely nothing by way of promptly stepping up to the plate, in American baseball parlance, to effect the necessary emendations that would have resulted in the kind of functionally progressive democratic governance protocol that Speaker Bagbin so desperately calls for in his “62-Point Statement” of a screed against Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo’s morally and civically well-informed and culturally enlightened reluctance and/or flat refusal to append his signature to the Anti-LGBT+ Bill recently passed into law by Ghana’s Parliament.

But perhaps what is even far more significant to highlight here is the scandalously inescapable fact that Mr. Bagbin royally contradicts himself, when the Speaker of Ghana’s 8^th Parliament vehemently argues in favor of the coordinate and the “autonomous” and the discrete inviolability of the institutional establishments of the Executive, the Legislature and the Judiciary, while at the same time vacuously insisting on the Statutory Supremacy of the Legislature or Parliament, by rather absurdly claiming that the President ought to have proceeded with the reception from Parliament and the ratification of the recently passed Anti-LGBTQ+ Bill into law, even while there were several interlocutory injunctions before the august Supreme Court of Ghana challenging the validity of Parliament’s flagrant disregard for the Human and the Civil Rights of the members of the LGBTQ+ Community, on the patently mischievous grounds that once the Anti-LGBTQ+ Bill had been signed or ratified into a bona fide law of the land by the President, the Apex Court could then demand that both the President and the august House of our National Assembly or Parliament reverse course, if it is determined by the Apex Court that, indeed, the Human and Civil Rights of LGBTQ+ people had been flagrantly and egregiously violated.

Now, what kind of backward and fiscally wasteful thinking is that? No doubt then that about 20 years ago, Yours Truly described Mr. Bagbin, at the time the Parliamentary Minority Caucus Leader of the National Democratic Congress, for being a clinically retarded buffoon who had absolutely no business pretending to be a patriotic statesman and getting comfortably paid, with clearly undeserved perks, for making a full-time career out of incessant parliamentary boycotts of the people’s sacred business. Twenty-plus years later, I still stand by my contention and conviction.

*Visit my blog at: KwameOkoampaAhoofeJr

By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., PhD
Professor Emeritus, Department of English
SUNY-Nassau Community College
Garden City, New York
March 22, 2024
E-mail: [email protected]