Suspend parliament until elections if there are no major consequences - CenPOA

The Executive Director of the Centre for Public Opinion and Awareness (CenPOA) has commended Speaker Alban Bagbin for demonstrating leadership on Tuesday, October 22, 2024, when the House resumed sitting.

Michael Donyinah Mensah said when the majority of the people expected a showdown in the House following the controversies surrounding the declaration of four parliamentary seats vacant, the Speaker handled the situation better.

He said the declaration of the four seats vacant was an error committed by the Speaker while faulting former Speaker Mike Oquaye as the one who set the bad precedent when he declared the Fomena seat vacant.

The policy analyst asserted that we would not have been here if both sides of the House had tackled issues in the national interest and ignored their differences and looked at the business of Ghana and its development.

Reacting to the ongoing controversies in parliament and the clamour for who is the majority in Parliament, he said there are several important bills that the House should consider, but the ongoing impasse has brought everything to a halt.

He commended the Speaker for suspending the house indefinitely while suggesting that "if this decision would have no serious or negative impact, I think Parliament should suspend sitting indefinitely until the end of the December 7, 2024, presidential and parliamentary elections’’.

He went on to state “This is a defining moment for Ghana because we never expected to get to this stage. We shouldn’t have come here. When you look at what led us here today, you’ll notice that one NPP MP opted to run as an independent candidate, and the NPP launched a witch hunt against him. They had all of the manpower they needed, but they were locked in this scenario since they were witch-hunting someone who defected to go independent, and it has now come back to harm them.”

"We have lessons to learn from what is happening. We should understand that whatever decision we take today, there will certainly be consequences for these decisions. We may not see the effects today, but these decisions may come back to hurt us.

I will also commend the speaker once again for demonstrating leadership. The decision he made so far is the best decision that can help calm tempers. My suggestion is that, if it would not be a problem, I strongly propose that the House should actually go off indefinitely until the end of the elections so we would know the next way forward,” he said.