As most Ghanaian citizens are already well aware, the Speaker of Parliament is specifically mandated by the country’s Fourth-Republican Constitution to be Non-Partisan in official institutional affiliation with any of the political parties represented in our august National Assembly (NA). This, of course, is not either strictly or exactly the same as ideologically or even practically not being registered as a member of one of the legitimately registered and recognized political parties in the country. It is absolutely no secret that the current Speaker of Parliament, Mr. Alban Kingsford Sumana Bagbin, is a dyed-in-the-wool National Democratic Congress partisan who left Parliament as the longest-serving representative of the Rawlings-founded National Democratic Congress and, perhaps, even the longest-serving Parliamentarian in the history of Fourth-Republican Ghana.
As well, his rather strategically tendentious decision to appoint the dynastic General-Secretary of the National Democratic Congress, Mr. Johnson Asiedu-Nketia, as his right-hand man on the Parliamentary Service Committee (PSC) must leave absolutely no one in doubt that Mr. Bagbin is not the sort of politically and ideologically neutral House Speaker that the framers of the 1992 Republican Constitution had in mind when they made the decision to have the Speaker of the august House be a non-partisan affiliate. On the other hand, and this is equally important to observe, the two Deputy Parliamentary Speakers whose positions the Constitution also warrants or stipulates, are appointed from among the ranks of our Parliamentary Representatives whose raison d’etre or first and foremost reason for being seated in our august House is to represent the interests, needs and the aspirations of their primary constituents or the voters and citizens who elected these representatives.
The unmistakably clear distinction here is that the substantive Speaker of the House Does Not Represent any Parliamentary District or Constituency in the country. So, why is the organized political opposition, largely composed of the membership and the leadership of the National Democratic Congress (NDC), scarcely a political party establishment whose leadership – criminally indemnified by the functionally and effectively hobbled almost exclusively National Democratic Congress-crafted 1992 Constitution – pretending as if a Deputy Parliamentary Speaker has the same status as the substantive Speaker of the House?
You see, a Deputy Speaker, as clearly and unambiguously articulated by the Anin-Yeboah-presided Supreme Court of Ghana (SCOG), does not peremptorily or summarily lose his/her preexistent title and/or status as a bona fide Member of Parliament merely because s/he has been epiphenomenally or incidentally elected or appointed to temporarily and intermittently deputize for the substantive Speaker of Parliament, in this particular instance, Mr. Alban Sumana Kingsford Bagbin, the former National Democratic Congress’ Member of Parliament for the Nadowli-Kaleo Constituency, in the Upper-West Region, who has already established a felonious and treasonous personal culture of perennially seeking medical treatment like a political exile in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) or Dubai, to be precise.
To be certain, what critically thinking Ghanaian citizens and serious lovers of democracy ought to be discussing right now, and I strictly mean the country’s opinion leaders, is the fact of whether it is not well-nigh and, in fact, far- and long-past time for Speaker Bagbin to be stripped of his post or asked to promptly resign from the same in order to make way for a Speaker who is more medically sound and psychologically and emotionally mature, politically progressive and professionally qualified to preside over the sacred business of the august House of our National Assembly and, by logical extension the nation at large, as has been exemplarily done in the past by the likes of Messrs. Ebenezer Begyina Sekyi-Hughes, Francis Annan and Michael Aaron Oquaye and Mrs. Joyce Bamford-Addo, to name just a few of our most distinguished House Speakers in the recent past.
As a former long-serving member and leader of Ghana’s Fourth-Republican Parliament, Speaker Bagbin is inextricably integral to the needlessly dysfunctional problems presently raging within the august House. As a leader of the National Democratic Congress, as I vividly recall, the former Nadowli-Kaleo Member of Parliament established the fiscally irresponsible and downright wasteful cultural precedent of incessant boycotts rather than professionally and constructively engage the extant New Patriotic Party (NPP) Parliamentary Majority in the bipartisan activities of the House and, for that matter, the pressing business of the nation at large.
You see, Dear Reader, absolutely nothing happens in a vacuum, which is precisely why I find the present hypocritical eruption of make-believe conniption against the ruling of the Anin-Yeboah-presided Apex Court to be decidedly bizarre and irredeemably distasteful, and this, of course, is putting it extremely conservatively and diplomatically mildly, that the overwhelming majority of Ghana’s opinion leaders on the opposition side of the ideological divide would conveniently, if also unwisely, attempt to obfuscate what the real issue at stake here but rather luridly choose to blasphemously belittle the intelligence of the 7 Justices who unanimously decided that the intermittently functional post of a Parliamentary Deputy Speaker is not exactly the same as or immutably synonymous with that of the substantive Speaker of Parliament.
Now, even as a political science faculty member from the University of Ghana, Legon, the nation’s oldest and foremost tertiary academy wondered loudly and publicly in show of his utter displeasure and disappointment with the ruling of the Anin-Yeboah Court, in the matter that forms the basis or main subject of the present column, it is about time our cantankerous and punch-drunk lawmakers begin tabling and seriously debating the fact of whether the posts of First- and Second-Deputy Parliamentary Speakers need to be held by non-party-affiliated members of the august House. Of course, the question that immediately arises here has to do with the fiscal expenditures or logistics, that is, the question of whether any Deputy Speakers so appointed would be regarded as full-time members of the august House and therefore deserving of being fully salaried like the substantive Speaker of the House.
And if so, precisely what would be the duties of these Non-MP Deputy Parliamentary Speakers as bona fide full-members of our National Assembly? I have deliberately decided not to weave my argument or narrative around the relevant constitutional provisions and articles involved in the current debate because, as I have already indicated ad-nauseam in the past, for the most part, the current National Democratic Congress-crafted, or rather amateurishly cobbled or plagiaristically composed, 1992 Republican Constitution is poorly edited and barely readable. Plus, the obvious fact of this author’s not having been legally trained as a constitutional lawyer or even a political scientist, although he had the privileged opportunity of taking several undergraduate and graduate courses in political science and acquitted himself creditably in all of them.
At any rate, the issue at stake here is primarily one of common sense and judicial logic or justice, far more than it pertains to trivial legal technicalities, as some ardent opponents of the Supreme Court ruling would have those of us in perfect agreement with the SCOG believe. You see, the matter at issue here is scarcely anything more than a strategically entrenched fisticuff or scuffle between an E-Levy fixated Akufo-Addo Administration and an equally anti-E-Levy fixated membership of the Mahama-led main opposition National Democratic Congress. As well, gratuitously and mischievously conflating the latest Supreme Court ruling on the Deputy Speaker’s inalienable constitutional right to vote even as a presiding Interim or Substitute Speaker of Parliament, as a bonafide member of the august House, unlike the substantive Speaker, with the SALL Constituency Conundrum, as one morbidly self-infatuated notorious daughter of a former Prime Minister, who was himself not known to be remarkably respectful of the judicial establishment of the Supreme Court of Ghana, in classical Woolfian parlance, does not cut ice. It is an inexcusably lame and predictable attempt to ignore the real issue at stake here, which, as a glaring matter of fact, has already been amply and dispassionately dealt with above and thus needs no further discursive amplification.
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