Parliament Should Be Separated from the Executive

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

Ghana’s first-deputy parliamentary speaker, Mr. Edward Doe Adjaho, recently lamented that the legislative branch of government is highly limited in its policy oversight capacity vis-à-vis efficient appropriation of development assistance and public resources, in general, because “not all Members of Parliament are knowledgeable on the key issues in the Accra Agenda for Action on Aid Architecture” (See “Adjaho Advocates Increased Capacity Building for Parliament” Modernghana.com 10/6/10).

Actually, it would be rather naïve and downright foolhardy for anybody to expect that all Ghanaian parliamentarians would be equally knowledgeable in all spheres of endeavor. Such expectation does not exist in any society or culture around the globe. And it is for this reason why in most advanced parliamentary and congressional democracies, such as the United States and Britain, the duties of representatives are meticulously and systematically fashioned around specialized committees such as education, health and human services, finance, transport, security and foreign affairs, for obvious examples.

In the Ghanaian parliament, many of these crucial structures exist; however, they tend to be largely rudimentary and nominal. This is due, primarily, to the fact that parliamentary democratic culture only began to take significant roots only some two decades ago; and even since then, the performance of parliamentarians has at best been marginal and at the worst absolutely lackluster.

In its latter form, the performance of legislators has been unnecessarily mired in rampant boycotts of parliamentary proceedings. And in its former manifestation, legislators, especially those in the majority, have rather sophomorically and unprofessionally allowed their duties to be routinely usurped by the executive branch of government. The latter state of affairs has arisen primarily because of Ghana’s hybrid parliamentary system, in which a remarkably high percentage of ruling-party parliamentarians also double as cabinet appointees. This kind of bizarre regime encourages easy cooptation of representatives by the executive branch of government, as was recently witnessed when the parliamentary majority leader and several of his associates were suctioned into the president’s cabinet.
Shortly thereafter, the president unilaterally announced the establishment of a Constitution Review Committee (CRC). And here, it is significant to point out that prior to his executive cooptation, the parliamentary majority leader had publicly vowed to fiercely resist any illegal attempt by the executive branch of government to usurp the constitutional review mandate entrusted the legislature. In the end, crass political bribery trumped the august rule of law. And today, the former parliamentary majority leader is Minister of Water Resources, Works and Housing!
What needs to be done in order to make our national assembly representatives functionally effective is for parliament to set up two separate ideological and policy-knowledge banks for the two main political parties, where cutting-edge research information on current and past governmental affairs could be readily accessed. Such venture would necessitate the hiring of experts at highly competitive salaries to staff these facilities. In advanced democracies like the United States, for example, such facilities exist in the form of the provision of expert staffers for individual congressional representatives made available by a comprehensive congressional budget. Thus individual representatives may have on staff people with expertise ranging from law, engineering, communications, health, and consumer affairs. It is these well-remunerated personnel who ensure that the various representatives are well-prepared on a daily basis for productive debates and decision-making on pressing issues of national exigency on which they, individually, may not be necessarily knowledgeable or even professionally qualified to tackle.
Oftentimes, some of these staffers may be seen on television with the representatives for whom they work on the floor of both houses of Congress. Needless to say, these staffers often carry information and reference folders; these days, the latter come in the form of laptop computers.
Still, what would make Ghanaian politicians as efficient as their counterparts in the advanced democracies is for parliament to set up periodic workshops and policymaking clinics in order to enable representatives boost their functional capacities. Such workshops and clinics could be made mandatory, with deliberate shirkers, or absentees, being sanctioned with serious penalties, ranging from fines to suspension from relevant parliamentary proceedings.
Indeed, there is absolutely nothing wrong with some magnanimous benefactors from the European parliament assisting their less experienced Ghanaian counterparts to enrich and boost their capacity for oversight/managerial competence. The problem, though, is that this is the postcolonial twenty-first century, and it is rather ironic for a party like the ruling National Democratic Congress (NDC) most of whose membership claims to be the proud products of Nkrumaism to be salivating over what their late hero may cynically, snidely and sarcastically have described as “neocolonialism.”

*Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D., is Associate Professor of English, Journalism and Creative Writing at Nassau Community College of the State University of New York, Garden City. He is a Governing Board Member of the Accra-based Danquah Institute (DI) and the author of 21 books, including “Ghanaian Politics Today” (Atumpan Publications/Lulu.com, 2008). E-mail: [email protected].
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