For an academic who so proudly boasts about his in-depth knowledge and appreciation for Constitutional Democracy, University of Ghana’s political scientist Ransford Yaw Gyampo gives a very poor impression about the reputation and the professional caliber of the kind of administrators who hired and groomed him to teach at the J. B. Danquah-championed and actively supported, oldest and foremost tertiary academy in the country.
The last time that this writer wrote and published anything whose subject-matter had something to do with this garrulous and sloppy, passionately pro-Mahama and the street-brawling culture of the country’s main opposition political party, the National Democratic Congress (NDC), the article had to do with the intellectually and the logically unsound demand by the self-described Akuapem-Larteh and Saltpond native to have the much-maligned, populist old faux-socialist policy of “price control” slapped on cement traders in the country, because the prices of this admittedly most important commodity had begun to sharply rise on our local markets.
Now, for a presumably learned political scientist who claims seating among the vanguard ranks of the nation’s scholars and political theorists and, perhaps, even thinkers, one would have expected that Prof. Gyampo would also remarkably appreciate something worthwhile about the indispensable centrality of Free-Market Culture and regime to the kind of Western type of Constitutional Democracy being presently practiced in Ghana, in particular the basic and the elementary principle of Supply and Demand or Demand and Supply of the kind and the brand which the likes of Yours Truly were taught in high school, while growing up in the Ghana of the mid-1970s and the early 1980s. Which called for the maximization of the production of “staple” consumer products such as that which is presently being herein discussed, in order to logically and organically arrest the sort of exorbitant and unsavory price gouging, as Americans are wont to say, that was making it extremely difficult for ordinary Ghanaian citizens intending to build their own homes and private residences to be able to comfortably afford the same.
Even more ironic is the fact that the European Studies trained acerbic but scarcely sober and intellectually and rhetorically deliberate Prof. Gyampo belongs to a political party with a “revolutionary” tradition of persecuting free-market and capitalist-leaning Ghanaian entrepreneurs, even as the politically kleptocratic leadership of the erstwhile late Chairman Jeremiah “Jerry” John Rawlings-led junta of the Provisional National Defense Council (PNDC), the immediate institutional parent of the present-day National Democratic Congress (NDC), voraciously expropriated and cannibalized state-owned properties and thievishly privatized and appropriated the same as their own.
Now, what the foregoing means is that his morally and personally irresponsible choice of political party affiliation, as well as ideological suasion, for that matter, leaves Prof. Gyampo with a negligibly little to absolutely nothing in terms of his moral authority and credibility to effectively deal with such serious matters of democratic culture and governance of the sort that recently brought the National Democratic Congress-sponsored Speaker of Ghana’s Parliament into what may be aptly characterized as respective governance “Turf Delineation Conflict” involving the Traditional Three Branches of Democratic Governance, namely, the Executive, the Legislature and the Judiciary.
In the present instance, however, the problem has wholly and exclusively to do with the Strict Interpretation of Statute or the Law, which is the exclusive and the especial preserve of the Apex Court or the Supreme Court of Ghana. Now, we have Prof. Gyampo, who is not known to have acquired any significant professional training in the discipline and the practice of law, rudely and imperiously telling the general Ghanaian public that Chief Justice Gertrude Araba Esaaba Sackey Torkornoo-presided Supreme Court of Ghana has absolutely no constitutionally mandated power or right to “gag” the Legislature or Parliament (See “ ‘Judiciary Has No Power to Gag Parliament’ – Prof. Gyampo on Suspension of MPs Removal” Modernghana.com 10/18/24).
The truth of the matter here, though, is that the Torkornoo Court has, thus far, made absolutely no attempt to either arbitrarily or capriciously put the kibosh on Speaker Alban Sumana Kingsford Bagbin-presided Ghana National Assembly. Speaker Bagbin, by the way, is himself a prominent and a veteran lawyer and lawmaker in ways that the University of Ghana’s Prof. Gyampo could only marginally fathom. In other words, if any authoritative leader or citizen in the country possesses the level of knowledge required to call the Apex Court to order on any matter verging on a flagrant violation of its constitutionally mandated terms of reference, that citizen is definitely Speaker Bagbin and not a complete professional outlier or disciplinary outsider like Prof. Gyampo.
Now, the very adult question that may be discombobulating the relatively wet-eared Prof. Gyampo has strictly to do with the interpretation of Article 97 (1) (g) of Ghana’s 1992 Republican Constitution, regarding the strictly procedural removal of political party-sponsored Members of Parliament who, for any number of reasons, including sheer greed and megalomania, or purely predicated on matters of principle, decide to contest for the retention of the very seats which they have legitimately lost in a party parliamentary primary as Independents.
You see, what an apparently psychologically and an emotionally agitated Prof. Gyampo conveniently ignores to let his audience in on, as it were, is the fact that the intervention by the Torkornoo Court, which promptly placed a “Stay of Execution” or temporary suspension on Speaker Bagbain’s rather curious and anomalous decision to remove the four Members of Parliament who had declared their official intention to contest for their Parliamentary Seats as Independents, rather than on the tickets of their respective political parties that had originally sponsored them to Parliament, was precipitated by a rancorous dispute between the New Patriotic Party’s Parliamentary Majority Caucus and a passionately partisan Speaker Bagbin and the members of the National Democratic Congress’ Parliamentary Minority Caucus, for which reason Mr. Alexander Afenyo-Markin, the Parliamentary Majority Caucus’ Leader had promptly sought an injunction from the Apex Court.
Now, what clearly and comically appears to be his one most unbearable migraine is the fact that the Torkornoo Supreme Court had decided to historically unprecedentedly, and promptly, place a Stay of Execution or an order promptly suspending any mischievously calculated move by a strategically ever-scheming Speaker Bagbin to flagrantly and unconstitutionally “minoritize” the New Patriotic Party’s legitimately earned or acquired Parliamentary Majority Caucus’ status. It is not primarily or fundamentally because the Torkornoo Supreme Court has done anything either flagrantly Ultra-Vires or completely either out of the ordinary or out of order. It is not the endgame or a judicial finality. The most accurate interpretation of Article 97 (1) (g) still has yet to be definitively decided and resolved by the Torkornoo Court.
*Visit my blog at: KwameOkoampaAhoofeJr
By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., PhD
Professor Emeritus, Department of English
SUNY-Nassau Community College
Garden City, New York
Oct. 18, 2024
E-mail: [email protected]
This post was originally published on here
