Get Rid of NDC-Rigged Indemnity Clause and Appointment of Regional Ministers…

With barely five months to the watershed 2024 General Election, this is scarcely an opportune moment for the Presumptive Next President of our beloved Sovereign Democratic Republic of Ghana, Vice-President Mahamudu Bawumia, to be talking about the dire and/or the imperative need for a Constitutional Review (See “We need constitutional review to reduce the power of the President – Bawumia” Modernghana.com 5/31/24).

I am quite sure that the Walewale native, from the Akufo-Addo-created North-East Region, is well aware than the overwhelming majority of Ghanaian citizens that what the nation needs right now, and instantaneously so, is a drastic reduction in the level of rank official corruption in the country, and definitely not in the executive and statutory power of the President, unless a cogent argument can be made to Ghana’s electorate and the citizenry at large, that the currently insufferable level of official corruption in the country has everything to do with the magnitude of power afforded the President by Ghana’s 1992 Republican Constitution.

Candidate Bawumia is reported to have made the foregoing observation during an electioneering-campaign tour of the Akufo-Addo-created Oti Region on Friday, May 31, 2024. To make his case even more cogent and relevant, the twice-elected Vice-President Bawumia ought to have reminded his audience and the nation at large that it was the late President John Evans Atta-Mills who established the Constitutional Review Commission, on whose membership panel sat Mrs. Jean Adukwei Mensa, the present Chairperson of the Independent Electoral Commission, and duly submitted its findings and recommendations shortly before the abrupt and the untimely passing of President Mills, and whose recommendations, at least those that were deemed to be significant and relevant, had been expected to have been implemented by the immediate successor of the latter, namely, President John “European Airbus Payola” Dramani Mahama but, as was predictably to be expected, never got implemented, much less be debated by the then National Democratic Congress-controlled Parliament.

Yes, not only was this abject lack of initiative to be expected of an emotionally undernourished and a pathologically narcissistic and megalomaniacal President Mahama, the Bole-Bamboi native, from the Akufo-Addo-created Savannah Region, would also proceed to revoltingly demonstrate that he had absolutely no appetite for having his extensive executive powers to ride roughshod over the Supreme Court of Ghana curtailed or significantly reduced in order to strengthen the sacred democratic principle of checks-and-balances among the three coequal branches of democratic governance, namely, the Executive, the Legislature and the Judiciary.

Vice-President Bawumia would have afforded his argument further cogency and his electioneering-campaign message greater resonance with Ghanaian voters and citizens by reminding the nation of the virtual pillory box to which the Chief Justice Georgina Theodora Wood-presided Apex Court had been scandalously reduced by the media-goon sponsoring President Mahama, a striking example of which was his staunch backing of the globally infamous Montie Trio of broadcast-media fixtures who publicly threatened to sexually violate Chief Justice Wood and criminally dismember or summarily liquidate several members of the highest court of the land deemed by the Mahama Presidency to be on the wrong side of the kleptomaniacal and the ballot-rigging agenda of the key operatives of the National Democratic Congress.

It is also likely that Candidate Bawumia may have so soon and strangely forgotten that the very first Ghanaian leader in the Post-Mills Era to seriously attempt to implement any of the recommendations of the Constitutional Review Commission was, predictably, none other than the Legendary Leprechaun of Akyem-Abomosu and Kyebi, to wit, Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo, in the salutary form of the December 19, 2019 Referendum on the critical question of whether to have our Metropolitan, Municipal and District Chief Executive Officers directly elected by the very people they were being directly appointed by the President to serve, so as to make these MMDCEs more democratically accountable to the people.

And then what happened? The Anti-Democracy operatives of the National Democratic Congress, led by “Lt-Col.” Johnson “The Mosquito” Asiedu-Nketia, together with the collusive and the collaborative complicity of some distinguished and prominent Ghanaian monarchs and chieftains would royally sabotage this progressive and civilized attempt to healthily “deepen Ghanaian democracy,” as a deeply disappointed President Akufo-Addo bitterly lamented at the time. Nobody really expected Kwame Gonja to implement a single one of the recommendations of the Atta-Mills-established Constitutional Review Commission. After all, hadn’t the infamous “Shit-Bomber” also promised to retrieve every single pesewa of Alfred Agbesi Woyome’s GH₡51.2 million Mega-Heist? And just really what happened, Dear Reader?

Well, as for this desperate proposition of all legitimately registered and/or viable political parties in the country subscribing to a Single National Development Plan, it is simply just that. I mean, Candidate Bawumia would be far better off calling for the summary constitution of a Union Government (UNIGOV) or the sort of the One-Party State proposed in the 1970s by an increasingly autocratic and megalomaniacal Gen. Ignatius Kwasi Kutu Acheampong. Which means the immediate scrapping of Ghana’s 1992 Republican, by the way. Now, is this really what Candidate Bawumia wants for the New Ghana? Backward Ever, Forward Never?!

If the preceding query has validity, then what is the entire point of having our various political parties and ideological suasions market diverse national development agendas, if political unification is the endgame a la the so-called National Development Planning Commission (NDPC)? Or is Candidate Bawumia prematurely conceding defeat here? Come on, wake up, Uncle Bawumia, before I cap up my pen or click it in and slam-shut my laptop!

*Visit my blog at: KwameOkoampaAhoofeJr

By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., PhD
Professor Emeritus, Department of English
SUNY-Nassau Community College
Garden City, New York
June 1, 2024
E-mail: [email protected]