The People’s Business Comes First, Your Honorables

By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.
Garden City, New York
July 30, 2016
E-mail: [email protected]

As far as I have been able to observe, our parliamentarians are among the most underemployed and overpaid of their kind anywhere in the postcolonial world. They are also among the most self-centered and self-serving of their ilk. And so I was not the least bit flabbergasted to learn about some of them protesting against the decision by Speaker Edward Doe Adjaho, and some of the other leaders of the House, to extend sitting by seven days in order to significantly reduce the backlog of activities, largely bills, in need of prompt attention before heading home for their month-long vacation (See “MPs Protest 7-Day Sitting Extension” MyJoyOnline.com / Ghanaweb.com 7/29/16).

What fascinated me about the protest was its striking reflection on the character of the protesters themselves, and much less the fact of whether such extension of sitting had any purposeful aspect to it. Very likely, there was not much that was either meaningful or progressive about the decision of Parliament, or rather our parliamentary leaders, to extend its sitting one more week. Very likely, all that would transpire would entail the facile rubber-stamping of bills and budgetary approvals that otherwise would have required more time and cranial exertion by way of deliberation than a mere seven days. Not that such slipshod approach towards the people’s business matters anyhow. For such has been the norm ever since anyone can remember.

Indeed, these days, Parliament appears to be laudably living up to its functional designation. Not very long ago, all that our representatives did in lieu of healthy debates was to throw up tantrums and walk out on the leaders of whichever political party held the majority of seats in the House and get fully paid by the cash-strapped Ghanaian taxpayer for doing absolutely nothing. Indeed, for most of the past twenty-four years of the existence of Ghana’s parliamentary democracy, the culture of the House has largely consisted of rampant and riotous walkouts. In this sense, I suppose that one could aptly conclude that the present parliament is not much different from that which existed under the Nkrumah-led Convention People’s Party (CPP) regime.

You may be wondering whether those parliamentarians who were reportedly protesting the seven-day extension of sitting were any worse or less patriotic than those who had acquiesced to the decision of their leaders to extend sitting beyond the regular parliamentary calendar. And this is where you may be grossly mistaken. For it was the relatively distant geographical locations of their constituencies that had tempered their equally avid desire to protest such extension. You see, veteran House members like Drs. Matthew Opoku-Prempeh and Anthony Akoto Osei, both of whom are from the Asante regional capital of Kumasi, wanted to be spared the weekend so that they could quickly visit with their constituents and participate in the ongoing voters’ register exhibition exercise being undertaken by the Electoral Commission (EC), which would have ended by the close of the seven-day sitting of the House.

Predictably, those parliamentarians with their constituencies located up-north beyond the Asante Region were having none of it. Like the proverbial crabs in a bucket, they would rather the House’s business was brought to a definitive closure so that they could have their traditional month-long vacation in one wholesome block so as to be able to fully concentrate on their first order of business, which is to get themselves reelected and back to the House to relish their fat-dripping paychecks and their “Honorable” salaams. At any rate, what struck me as quite revealing of the general administrative incompetence of successive Ghanaian governments, including, of course, the present government, is the fact that MPs from the northern-half of the country still, for the most part, feel themselves to be effectively cut off from their constituents, largely because of the generally deplorable condition of most of the country’s roadways.

The tragedy here is not because our northern kinsmen and women have been woefully, and perhaps even callously, neglected in the general development agenda of our nation whose past governments have been dominated by their southern kinsfolk, largely Ghanaian citizens of Akan descent. Interestingly, though, these days it is the northerners, jam-packed around President John Dramani Mahama, at the Flagstaff House, who call the shots. One begins to wonder at the great good that the billions of cedis pumped into SADA – the set aside funds for the exclusive use of northern Ghanaians – would have done for the development of roadways up-north, if Comrade Mahama had not recklessly doled out such funds for the rearing of non-existent guinea fowls and the planting of environmentally unsuitable trees, in the otherwise noble name of re-afforestation.

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