The Speaker of Parliament, Alban S.K. Bagbin, has been challenged by a former UN Senior Governance Advisor and CEO of JAK Foundation on his justification for the payment of ex-gratia to MPs.
The Speaker's stance, according to Prof. Baffour Agyeman-Duah, is untenable.
The Speaker's present attitude, he claims, contradicts a prior statement he made on the same subject.
As a result, he conveyed his dissatisfaction with the third gentleman of the land's remarks.
'You will not be invoiced by the state to cover your funeral expenditures.' Agyeman is a Ghanaian politician. -Duah dismisses Bagbin for his ex-gratia excuse
"I listened to the Speaker's two speeches, the one from 2019 and his most recent proclamation on the subject, and you have clearly highlighted the hypocrisy of our political system."
I pity him because he is a member of the elite in a bad way.
"Secondly, the argument you just made justifying the payment of this on the basis of personal goals of persons who want to serve the country, and stating that since you go to funerals and all that, you spend money; you must know that the state is not invoiced to pay your funeral expenditures." So I'm sad that the man's hypocrisy has been revealed so thoroughly," he remarked on Joy SMS on Thursday, June 16.
On Wednesday, June 15, the Rt. Honourable Speaker justified the payment of ex-gratia to Members of Parliament at a public presentation at the University for Professional Studies.
He claimed that the money was stolen. is critical for the MPs' long-term survival after serving the country.
According to him, ex-gratia does not help MPs as much as the public believes.
He added that Members of Parliament spend three times as much money on campaigning for their election as they do on ex-gratia.
"We're having these issues because there's a misconception that ex-gratia is a large sum of money...
You know you don't get that ex-gratia as an MP, since the money you spent to get elected to Parliament is three or four times what they give you as ex-gratia. No MP departs Parliament in a better position than when he or she arrived.
"Once a member of Parliament is elected, he must win the following election, thus they make sacrifices." Everything was done to appease the constituency's voters so that they might win again.
"At the end of the day, if they lose the election, they've lost everything," he explained. "They've put everything in the election, and now they've lost everything."
Following former Council of State member Togbe Afede's decision to refuse nearly 300,000 cedis granted to him after sitting on the National Council of State between 2017 and 2020, the issue of ex-gratia has reappeared.
Following that, social media users praised the Paramount Chief for refusing to accept the ex-gratia payment.
Netizens thanked him for safeguarding the public purse and considering the country's growth and development.
He is described as a "guy of integrity."
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