Parliament: 276 MPs, no Cabinet jobs, no Common Fund slice

If your MP cannot become a Minister and cannot control the Common Fund, what is your MP actually for? The CRC has an answer, and it is the right one. Column drops this week.

This week's column takes on the House. And I will not sugar-coat it: what the CRC is proposing here will be fought hardest by MPs of every party because it takes away three things they have grown fond of. That is exactly why we should support it.

First, the size of Parliament is capped at the current 276 seats. Every redistricting cycle in the last three decades has quietly added more MPs, more offices, more official V8s. That ratchet ends. If we want more MPs in the future, we will have to argue for them out loud, through a constitutional amendment.

Second, sitting MPs can no longer serve as Ministers. The constitutional double life ends; the same person grilling a Minister on Monday and sitting beside him in Cabinet on Wednesday. Ministerial ambition has kept many an ordinary MP quiet for thirty years. Take that away, and majority backbenchers finally become uncomfortably, usefully independent.

Third, and this is buried in the fine print, so watch for the quiet fight: MPs lose their slice of the District Assemblies Common Fund. Zero. Not one pesewa of DACF for any sitting MP. Since the 1990s, the MP's Common Fund has become a slush fund, a re-election tool, and the source of running quarrels with District Chief Executives. The CRC's logic is sharp: an MP is a legislator, not a contractor. Local development is the job of local government.

There are wins for constituents here too. Dual citizens become eligible to contest parliamentary seats. Backbenchers finally get real Private Member's Bill rights on anything that does not create a new office or a new tax. And the quadrennial ex-gratia bonanza is replaced by a proper pension scheme designed by an Independent Public Emoluments Commission. That reform alone would defuse a generation-long grievance.

The full argument drops on Tuesday, 29th September 2026.

Here is the citizen's test: watch which of your representatives speaks out against the removal of the DACF share on the floor of the House. Then remember, in 2028, whose interests that MP was defending.

Kwame Ghana Dayie!