With a vote of no confidence in both the President Nana Akufo-Addo/Bawumia government and the Speaker Bagbin-led Parliament on 7 December 2024, We-the-People who have proven our capability to take our destiny into our own hands must remain ever vigilant against further abuses during the balance of the tenure of the President and the 8th Parliament.

Convening parliament for two days only may be convenient for the finances of the Members of Parliament, otherwise I see no rational reason for wasting the public purse just a few days to the 2024 elections. Apart from providing a provisional budget for the incoming government on 7 January 2025, there is no emergency necessitating the Speaker wasting public funds to abridge the fourteen days to recall Parliament before 7 December 2024 for a two-day session.

Common observation throughout socialization in life and common sense teaches that intractable and intense emotional conflicts even when they appear to have been resolved leave residues which inform the next cycle of conflict between the same adversaries or their proxies. Whatever the short-term objective that the Speaker and his supporters have achieved, it will take an exceedingly long time for the centre to hold again now and in future Parliaments unless greed gives way to the love of our homeland Ghana.

But for the folly of the NDC and the Speaker of Parliament, the House would have been in session and holding the Chief Justice’s administrative action of closing the High Court and other courts in Bolgatanga and its environs to account for her actions on the spurious reasons assigned and the unprecedented nature of her action in the history of Ghana taken so close to an election on 7 December 2024 that must be free, fair, and transparent under the 1992 Constitution.

The Speaker of Parliament needs to think long before side stepping the orders of the Supreme Court through subterfuges to preside over pushing the 1992 Constitution into the inferno of implosion instead of defending it as his oath of office and the Constitution demands. The stability and survival of the Fourth Republic of Ghana must take precedence over transactional politics, opportunism, and adventurism by groups of political elites bent on serving parochial and short-term self interests instead of the interest of the citizens of Ghana.

The 2024 elections in Ghana must be fought and won on the integrity, honesty and policy programmes of the various candidates and their political parties. The unnecessary hyping of national tensions and promotion of violence which has the propensity to implode the 1992 Constitution just for the sake of raw power for its own sake without the interests of the citizens at heart must stop. Beware of 4 June 1979! Beware of 31 December 1981! None of the two major political parties will win when they undermine and facilitate the implosion of the 1992 Constitution.

The Kissi Agyebeng inspired petition to Parliament to probe into EOCO’s failure to investigate the non-existing money laundering allegations against Cecilia Dapaah is an exercise in futility except when the self confessed corrupt National Democratic Congress (NDC) Speaker of Parliament decides to use the petition for transactional political purposes. An NDC Member of Parliament (MP) I brought up into the politics of the Fourth Republic just also confessed that one cannot be an MP without being corrupt. Is that true?

“Self-preservation is the first law of nature”, and it would be political suicide for Nana Akufo-Addo to assent to the LGBTQ+ Bill being passed by Parliament into law. Nana Akufo-Addo’s long game, the aura he has built around himself as a democrat in the Western tradition, and all the ingratiation efforts he has invested in, will come to nought should he assent to the Bill upon passage. The fact that other citizens knew the difficulty the Bill was going to face when it got to the desk of the President was articulated by no less a person than Minority Leader Ato Forson.

I am raising my finger in this rejoinder against the wanton violations of the rights of the people of Ghana in the use of the military by the Government to brutalize the very electorate that brought it into power. We the people are sovereign under the 1992 Constitution and not the Speaker, Parliament, or the executive which if let alone will continue to trample upon our sovereignty with the obnoxious show in Parliament on 13 November 2023. Ghana will rise again!

The Parliament of Ghana has not proven itself in similar situations of military brutalities on citizens of being capable of providing a non-partisan and non-transactional solution or remedy unaffected by its self-interest. The ball must be left in the hands of constitutional defence activists and human rights lawyers who can speak truth to power through the process of lawfare. The 1992 Constitution must be defended at all costs.

Elected members of parliament are sacrificing the national good of our country for their personal selfishness and partisan interest, contravening the letter and spirit of the 1992 Constitution. Their actions are the sole reason why for some time now, “Everyday things are getting worse” for the economic and social survival of ordinary Ghanaians. The selfish economic and political power motives underpinning the divergent positions and tactics that both sides of the House used to remove two ministers from office demonstrate to Ghanaians that these members of parliament cannot be relied upon to fight for what our citizens need.

The Ghanaian electorate had been hoodwinked with a circus of deceptions since 26th November 2021 of sham disagreements amongst the Nana Akufo-Addo one-party dance ensemble in Parliament. We are now at the stage of what the two caucus in Parliament wanted and anticipated the most in the 2022 Budget season – the Budget Committee hearings and specially the accompanying allowances of various forms and shapes. The Minority enabled the appointment of the Minister of Finance together with any 2022 Budget hardships he inflicts upon Ghanaians. Judas Iscariot repented. The NDC can do the same.

The shameless compromise of the one-party political elite against the Ghanaian electorate by an equally divided Parliament of 137 members from each side of the House has been ably resisted, disrupted, and thrown into disarray by the alertness of affected stakeholders and We the People outside Parliament. The extent of the Minority’s betrayal and sell out of its conscience and the people of Ghana will be known when it formally accepts in Parliament any amendment(s) to the rejected 2022 Budget based on the illegal rescission and approval of 30th November 2022 contrary to the letter and spirit of Order 50 of the Standing Orders.

The 30th of November 2021 will go down in the annals of Ghana’s history as the day of Ghana’s Great Betrayal by an equally divided Parliament of 275 Members with 137 members from the New Patriotic Party (NPP), 137 members from the National Democratic Congress (NDC), and an independent member in their refusal or failure to perform their constitutional duties in holding the executive arm of Government to account without fear or favour, affection, or ill will. The one-party state prohibited by the spirit of Article 3 of the 1992 Constitution has slowly and imperceptibly crept into the governance style of our democratic-autocratic President…

One cannot claim the rights of an Honourable Member of Parliament when as a Minister one created suspicion of looting the national purse and deliberately running to Parliament (in anticipation of one’s his Government being voted out of office) to escape justice through the subterfuge of immunity. The President was elected with a national mandate to fight corruption. The Speaker and the Parliamentary Minister have created the impression that there is a mismatch between their perception of who must be investigated and prosecuted for suspected looting of the public purse, and the President’s vision and determination to prevent future looting by fighting corruption within his first four-year term. However, the Speaker and the Minister for Parliamentary Affairs have no national mandate to undermine the President’s executive authority to enforce the law through the instrumentality of his policing and prosecutorial powers. Only the courts of law can contest his authority.

The reputation and dignity of the Speaker of Parliament has deliberately been brought into serious inexcusable opprobrium and disrepute both in and outside Parliament by those indecorous Members of Parliament who rioted, banged desks, wagged their figures at the Speaker and granted interviews to the media to bring the high office of the Speaker into disrepute and contempt before reasonable members of the public. We elected the 275 Members of Parliament to show exemplary conduct to the nation in discharging their functions on our behalf in Parliament. Consequently, those who are calling for mere apologies to assuage the deliberate contempt are not helping to uphold the Constitutional order. The reputation, dignity and honour of the office of Speaker (bi-partisanly elected) must not be allowed to be used for partisan, cheap and uncouth posturing in any way.

There is an unsavory development in which some politicians - particularly some Members of Parliament and other political office holders – have cultivated the dishonourable habit of under-rating the intelligence of We the People by filling the press with half-truths. They misrepresent the injunctions of the Constitution and laws of Ghana to court cheap public sympathy any time one of the law enforcement agencies executes the law against one of them for the suspected commission of crime. I hate the hypocrisy, double standards and audacity of the Minority in Parliament to unlawfully and unconstitutionally impede police in the performance of their duties contrary to their very oaths of office as Members of Parliament, simply because their colleague is now under suspicion of crime in relation to the stinking AMERI contracts. Being a Member of Parliament cannot be used by former Government Ministers as an insurance against the commission or suspected commission of crimes. Ghanaians, be alert!