Akufo-Addo too powerful - Fritz Baffour

"I think the President is too powerful, he is very much an appointing authority in places where he could have left it alone”, Former Minister and Member of Parliament for Abuakwa South, Fritz Baffour has said.

Much as he believes in the President’s powers, he equally believes that government institutions are established for purposes of addressing key societal issues in their fields as and when the need arises, a task these institutions should be allowed to perform in the face of rising issues rather than having the President intervening in such cases before appropriate action is taken.

Speaking on Metro TV’s ‘Good Evening Ghana’ program, Mr. Baffour said,

“I’ll give you the Free SHS, absolutely nothing wrong with the Free SHS, but the thing is that all the schools became overcrowded and we didn’t have the resources and logistics to match. Then we had problems with sanitation and health, it didn’t have to be the president to come in, it had to be the health services to say this thing is not practical, can we wait? They were the ones to have intervened because they’ll say look our children’s health, you can’t have children sleeping outside, it had to be the institutions.

Touching on the acrimony between political parties in today’s dispensation, Mr. Baffour describing the situation as unfortunate maintained that though ideologies and policies differ from one party to another, politicians ought not to attack each other and or act like enemies to make a point.

“I believe we’ve lost our sense of discipline as a people, we need to start rethinking as to whether we want to continue going the way we are going now. I feel that im lucky, I know everybody, I know the Ex-President Kufour, I know President Mahama, I know President Rawlings, I know President Akufo-Addo, Stephen Ntim and all the guys from the other side just like I know my people….we are not doing it right. We are not enemies….”, he stated.

He further proposed a system where there is proportional representation in parliament to replace the ‘winner-takes-all’ ideology.

“The winner takes all is not right for us, we have to look at proportional representation in parliament”, he said.