How About Parliamentary Term Limits?

By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.

I hope the Parliamentary Minority Leader, Mr. Osei Kyei Mensah-Bonsu is not out to promoting corruption and cronyism when he bitterly laments that many experienced lawmakers are being massively voted out of parliament through the periodic exercising of electoral primaries (See "MPs Need Knowledge Support, Not Experience" Ghanaweb.com 5/22/14).

On the preceding score, I unreservedly concur with Prof. Richard Amoako-Baah, head of the Political Science Department at the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST), that the minority leader's mindset dangerously contradicts the salient tenets of constitutional democracy of the kind being pursued in Fourth-Republican Ghana. To be certain, stacking up our National Assembly with career parliamentarians is apt to unhealthily encourage corruption and the kind of cronyism that makes one-party dictatorships seem like paradise.

More so, especially when the economically exploitative awarding of perks like terminal gratuities and automobile and housing "loans" appears to have become a permanent feature of the job. There can also be no gainsaying the fact, even as Mr. Mensah-Bonsu had occasion to recently point out, himself, that the single greatest bottleneck impeding the work of parliamentarians was the latter's curious inability to make laws, besides the daily routine of debating those already on the books and/or bills drafted and presented to them by the presidency, as well as institutional budgetary issues, one is apt to presume.

To be certain, I was indescribably stunned to learn from the minority leader, recently, that Ghanaian parliamentarians actually needed to append a provision to our Fourth-Republican Constitution in order to make it legal for our "lawmakers" to be able to make or pass laws by themselves! Well, in such a shockingly backward political culture, it ought to stagger the progressive imagination what relevance experience has to offer either the parliamentarians themselves or the country's development at large. In fact, the best response to this abject state of legislative stasis is precisely what Mr. Mensah-Bonsu is decrying.

In other words, the operation of our National Assembly in its current form and status is as good as nothing. One advantage about the high turnover in parliament is the likelihood of more knowledgeable citizens being voted into our legislature in order to make it more progressive and productive. For in its present form and condition, Ghanaians are not getting much by way of "value-for-money." And this is inexcusably criminal.

Here in New York City, for example, several years ago, when it became disturbingly evident that political careerism was fast destroying the quality of our political culture, our community activists and the people agitated for the imposition of term limits to be put on the ballot in the form of a referendum. And today, on the City Council, the number of years that a councilman or woman is entitled to serving in the Chamber has been clearly spelled out in the Council's Charter. A similar measure ought to be instituted in Ghana's parliament, if any meaningful progress is to be attained in the long haul.

It is also significant to point out that most congressional representatives here in the United States serve two-year term limits and not four, as is the case in Ghana. In other words, every two years our equivalent of Ghanaian parliamentarians have to go back to their constituencies in order to have the voters renew their mandate or otherwise. One positive aspect of this kind of electoral regime is that it forces our congressional representatives or National Assembly members to work diligently on behalf of their respective constituents and the nation at large.

It is thus quite obvious that nearly two decades after being voted into Parliament, Mr. Mensah-Bonsu does not seem to fully appreciate his job description. I have also wondered, from time to time, why the relatively more intellectually packed New Patriotic Party (NPP) does not have an astute professional lawyer as its leader. Indeed, it is on the preceding score that the suggestion by Prof. Amoako-Baah, the KNUST political scientist, for Ghanaian parliamentarians to be supported by a staff of crackerjack legal experts, as well as experts in the various fields of national endeavor, could not be more opportune.

Here in the United States, for instance, every congressional representative is equipped with a staff of administrative and legal experts of diverse specialties. In the case of a fledgling and financially under-resourced Ghana, "knowledge support," as Prof. Amoako-Baah terms it, could come in the form of having the two major political parties set up two discrete offices of legal experts and policy wonks, with the smaller minority party representatives having the option of accessing expertise from either office of their choice or even both.

Such support/auxilliary staff would be assigned the job of educating their clients on the intricacies of policy instruments and the implications of their positions and decisions on particular policies. Such knowledge-support staff would be composed of some of the most brilliant experts in their fields available; which means that a remarkable percentage of them would have to be salaried at the topmost income brackets available in both the civil and public service, if they are to be retained for remarkable lengths of time in order to achieve the best results in terms of policy-decision making efforts.

And on the preceding score, it bears highlighting the case of Mr. Tony Blankley (1948-2012), the British-born American chief-of-staff of former U.S. House Speaker Newt Gingrich, who reportedly earned an annual salary that was significantly higher than that of his boss. What I am trying to point out here is that in the most progressive of the advanced democracries, salaries are intelligently structured to synch with productivity, not mere titles.

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*Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.
Department of English
Nassau Community College of SUNY
Garden City, New York
Board Member, The Nassau Review
May 22, 2014
E-mail: [email protected]
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