Professor Ransford Gyampo, a senior political science lecturer at the University of Ghana, has appealed to both the Majority and Minority leaders of Parliament to tone down their rhetoric to enhance consensus building in the House.
“We must work to operationalise constitutional imperatives, else the rigid application of rules without contextualising them, will keep ushering thinking human beings, into a regime of robots.”
“If the last State of the Nation Address (SONA) cannot be formally debated by Parliament, then it is about time we interrogated its relevance after doing it over and over again and if it is merely to provide parliamentarians with information about what has been done, then we can simply send the speech to the Members of Parliament (MPs) electronically, rather than wasting resources to convene a sitting,” Prof. Gyampo noted.
He lauded President Nana Akufo-Addo for his last State of the Nation Address which gave a vivid account of the President’s first four years in Office, was concise, erudite, straightforward and simple.
Prof. Gyampo indicated that President Akufo-Addo touched virtually on everything from where Ghana was, at the time he was sworn in as President on January 7, 2017, and what the situation in his view was as at now.
He commended the president for being honest in telling the citizenry what his administration had done over the past four years however, said the SONA coming just after 2020 general election that witnessed some deaths should have contained comments about the needless loss of lives and commiseration with the family of the departed.
“It should also have come with some vows and commitment, dedication and determination to resolving infractions of the law, with the view to forestalling recurrence of such unwarranted deaths in any future elections, with regard to the call in the SONA for a national conversation about illegal mining, there was no need for such a call.
“The disastrous effects of illegal mining on the nation’s water bodies, and on the sources of human livelihood, were unquantifiable and the quest to maintain political power, should not be enough to make any regime relent in fighting it,” Prof. Gyampo observed. -GNA
