The decision by the Constitution Review Consultative Committee (CRCC), charged by the recently outgone President Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo to make recommendations on the necessity of capping the numerical capacity of Ghana’s Fourth-Republican Parliament at 277 Parliamentary Seats, leaves much to be desired. It is simply untenable, if also because the reasons given by the membership of the CRCC, as contained in some media reports, for recommending the aforementioned figure of 277 Parliamentary Seats is clearly more politically and partisan based, rather than being squarely and properly and/or rationally predicated on the primary ideological principles of principled democratic culture and governance.
We are rather lamely and timidly informed by the CRCC members, who recently submitted the Committees’ recommendations to former President Akufo-Addo, that the bizarre figure of 277 Parliamentary Seats was merely based based on the fact of the current seating capacity of the proverbial august House being composed of 276 parliamentary seats. Even more bizarre is the CRCC’s decision to recommend one additional parliamentary seat to the number of seats that currently exists, on the patently vacuous grounds that such numerical oddity simply seems like the right most appropriate recommendation to make, for reasons not meaningfully explained.
Very likely, some of the members of the CRCC were confusing the composition of Ghana’s Parliament with the Supreme Court of either Ghana or the United States of America, the institutional model to which many Ghanaian leaders appear to be so blindly and pathologically addicted. Now, what kind of madness or logical irrationality is this? (See “Cap Parliament Size at 277 MPs - Constitutional Review Consultative Committee Report” Modernghana.com 1/31/24). Such mathematical oddity could have emanated from a chucklehead copycat’s realization of the fact that the United States’ Congress is composed of some 435 seats, excluding the several dozen nonvoting seats of representatives from some autonomous and semi-autonomous territories owned or controlled by the United States. But, of course, such logically twisted mode of reasoning immediately falls apart, when one also reckons the fact that the United States Senate has a Voting Membership of 100 Senators, an even number, even though in cases of voting ties, the Vice-President is permitted to break such deadlocks.
You see, one would have constructively reasoned that the CRCC recommendations would be predicated on the mathematical rationality of vintage democratic culture, such as is globally known to exist hereabouts the United States of America, where Congressional Districts or Parliamentary Constituencies are periodically demarcated strictly on the basis of numerical conglomerates or agglomerations, with approximately every “community” of 100,000 people of qualified voting adult citizens being represented by One Congressional Representative or Parliamentarian, with the necessary Congressional Re-Demarcation of Districts or Constituencies being executed Biennially or Periodically on the basis of population shifts from time to time, district to district and region to region, as the relevant case or cases may be.
In Ghana, on the other hand, we are being so absurdly informed that Parliamentary Constituency Demarcations have to be determined strictly on the basis of the capricious whims of political party executives and their followers among the rank-and-file membership of eligible voting populations and political party strongholds. What kind of intellectual idleness is this? And all this while, we erroneously thought that it was “Babies with Sharp Teeth” like the Twene Jonases whose admittedly boorish rhetorical buffoonery and conduct left much to be desired!
Do I really need to say that there is absolutely no good reason why a relatively small country like Ghana, with a population well under 40-million people, should be fiscally supporting an obscenely profligate Parliament of more than 250 largely sinecured Representatives? Remember Speaker Alban S K Bagbin, not very long ago, telling former President Akufo-Addo that “Parliament is its own master and beyond the fiscally disciplinary reach of the Executive”? Now, to be fair and decently frank with the Dear Reader, Ghana does not really need a Parliament with a seating capacity of more than 150 members, when one also factors into the equation the sort of generally low-quality of policy discourse and legislative brick-batting that are the major dietary fare therein.
Equally wasteful, of course, is the protracted temporal span that it took both the former President and the Constitution Review Consultative Committee to arrive at such nationally and globally embarrassing decisions and hairbrained conclusions as the foregoing. And then to think of the boastful mantra of the key operatives of the seismically defeated New Patriotic Party being: “We Have The Men.” It makes such a circus act all the more at once peevish and risible. The fact of the matter is that even if we hypothetically concur with the foregoing mantra, at least for the sake of our present discursive purposes, could we also hypothetically concur that the largely self-infatuated leadership of the New Patriotic Party also “Have The Brains”? I seriously and sincerely doubt that.
Once again, President John “Mistakes-Correcting” Dramani Mahama has been presented with another prime opportunity to promptly step up to the proverbial plate and make a more meaningful and lasting name for himself in the annals of both postcolonial and Fourth-Republican Ghanaian History, by significantly enhancing the quality of the practice of Ghanaian Democracy.
By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., PhD
Professor Emeritus, Department of English
SUNY-Nassau Community College
Garden City, New York
January 16, 2025
E-mail: [email protected]