MPs must vacate seats...

A lecturer at the Faculty of law, University of Ghana is calling for a constitutional amendment to compel any Member of Parliament who is appointed into ministerial position to vacate his or her seat in Parliament.

Professor Kofi Quarshigah says the practice under the 1979 Constitution where MPs could not be ministers had to be adopted for a virile legislature in which members would have the courage to be independent.

He says such a measure will also ensure that issues are considered from a nationalistic perspective.

He says the presidential system of government created a stronger executive than the parliamentary system making it necessary for a comparatively stronger legislature to balance the authority of the executive.

In a paper prepared for the Graphic that addressed some issues arising from the African Peer Review Mechanism (APRM) report on Ghana, Prof Quarshigah said although the Constitution purported to create the legislature, executive and judiciary as comparatively equal organs, the executive by nature of its functions and the control it had over the purse and distribution of executive positions, had the potential to tilt the power balance.

According to him, the provision that required that a majority of ministers should be appointed from Parliament did not help matters particularly in this part of the world where some people perceived appointments into executive positions as an opportunity to access wealth.

?It is just human to expect that under such circumstances, members of the President?s party and a few others in Parliament may not want to ruin their chances of appointment into ministerial positions being too critical of the government,? he said.

Prof Quarshigah said the APRM country report carried inherent indictments on the operatives of the three arms of government, instead of the Constitution itself.

He explained that there is the tendency for the President to hide behind the open-ended provisions of the constitution to pack the Supreme Court and also create an unnecessarily unwieldy executive.

He said for the legislature, the tendency on the part of the members of the majority in Parliament to toe the party line, with the hope of benefiting from ministerial appointments, derogated from the virtues of the concept of separation of powers.

He said for the judiciary, decisions are likely to be influenced by the fact that having been appointed by a particular government.