Politics of Tuesday, 14 August 2012

Source: Stephen Darko

CI 73 bogus— Osei-Prempeh

Chairman for the Constitutional, Legal and Parliamentary Subsidiary Legislation Committee of Parliament, Kwame Osei-Prempeh, has stressed that the Constitutional Instrument (CI), creating new 45 constituencies is fraught with several inconsistencies and errors, which required urgent amendments.

To him, until the discrepancies are amended, Parliament would be doing huge disservice to the nation if it went ahead to pass it into law, stressing that the move would open the floodgate for litigation.

The Member of Parliament (MP) for Nsuta Kwamang Beposo Constituency said this on Oman Fm in Accra on Tuesday during the station’s flagship morning show programme, National Agenda.

“Upon careful assessment of the document, we find out that more than 100 electoral areas were conspicuously missing, so it is important that those missing areas are included with the grammatical errors corrected,” the NPP MP affirmed.

The Committee after ten times of sitting on the CI recommended to the House to reject the document even though it has just two days to be operational as law. If the Committee gets two-third of the members of the House to support its recommendation then the document would be redrawn for the Electoral Commission to infuse the necessary corrections.

The development has however attracted widespread agitation, particularly among followers of the New Patriotic Party (NPP) and the ruling National Democratic Congress (NDC), as it is widely believed that the NDC may increase their number of seats if the law is passed.

With the Minority stuck to its grounds to ensuring the document is dismissed, members on the Majority are poised to use its numbers to push it through.