I have been thinking about the President, our President and the presidency in general. There are 25 million of us Ghanaians and with the best will in the world, our President cannot possibly hear all of us. On the other hand if the President has something he wants us the citizens to hear, it is quite easy for him to get to us.
But when it comes to information that the President has or might have and he chooses not to tell, I can’t work out how to get it out of him or work out if he is obliged to tell.
Here is a story I have been told and been trying to check for a while. Two years or so ago, a complaint was made about a judge of the superior courts who was alleged to have been involved in corrupt practices. A Disciplinary Committee of the Judicial Council was constituted to investigate the allegations.
According to my information, the judge admitted having received GH¢30,000 to influence the outcome of a case before him. The Disciplinary Committee recommended the judge be dismissed from the bench.
The recommendation was forwarded to the President and that is where the story seems to have come to an abrupt halt. Two years on, the judge is still on the bench; he has simply been transferred to a different region far from Accra. He continues to sit on cases and administer justice!!
Is our democracy healthy?
In trying to check on this story, I have run into matters that leave me truly agitated about the health of our democracy. I have looked up the relevant section of our Constitution that deals with what to do about arrant senior officials of the judiciary. With reference to this particular story, everything seems to have been done according to the book until the Disciplinary Committee finished its work.
Article 146 (9) states: The President shall, in each case, act in accordance with the recommendation of the committee.
So what happens when the President does not act in accordance with the recommendation of the committee? Is the President obliged to tell us the citizens why he does or does not do things?
Another example; competent bodies send their recommendations for the appointment of judges to the Supreme Court to the President and it appears the President can simply ignore the recommendations. He does not have to explain to anybody what the problem is or if indeed there is a problem with the recommendations that have been made to him.
Should the President be obliged to tell the people who make the recommendations why he chooses not to forward the name or names to Parliament for consideration? I have no idea what the lawyers think about these matters and I don’t really know if these are matters best left to lawyers but I certainly am puzzled. I am sure the President would have very good reasons why he might not want a particular person who has been recommended to him to be sent off to be vetted by Parliament; should he tell us the people?
Questionable appointments
One of the most important things a President does is to appoint people to help him run the affairs of state. From Ministers of State to MCE/DCEs to Managing Directors and Chief Executives to members of governing Boards of companies, the President has a lot of appointments to make.
It says in the Constitution that the President makes many appointments in consultation with the Council of State. The consultation seems to mean the Council of State is informed and indeed there is nothing to say that the President would not go right ahead with what he wants to do whiles the Council rants and raves.
There are quite a number of appointments that the President has made which have been a source of utter dismay for many. The most notorious was probably the erstwhile membership of the Board of the Electricity Company of Ghana, ECG, where the World Bank was able to publicly question the competence of the members much to the chagrin of all self-respecting Ghanaians.
Since such appointments are in the end, a disgrace or pride to all of us, should the President be obliged to tell us what criteria he employs to make them?
I have been totting up the number of reasons and excuses that have been offered for the power crisis we are enduring. For much of last year, there were differing and sometimes contradictory reasons from various agencies. The President himself was concentrating on telling us when the problem would be over when it was quite obvious that either he did not have all the relevant facts or he was not being briefed adequately.
The Takoradi thermal plant has not produced any power for about a year. At first we were told it had been shut down for maintenance, then there were various gas-related excuses and on and on we have gone; everything except a straightforward statement that the machine had broken down, the amount of wattage normally produced there was therefore not available for distribution.
Contradictory reasons
We have been hearing about two barges going to be procured from Turkey. Sometimes it is the GNPC, then it is VRA then it is some other institution that is procuring it. Is there any reason why every intervention being dreamt of is sold to us as the definitive solution to the problem? Can someone just say we are producing 850 megawatts of power and we need more than 2,000 megawatts and how the deficit will be found and at what cost?
It will not make my hairdresser any happier that her business is collapsing but she can ignore the schedule published by the ECG and better plan her life.
Is there any way the citizens can make the President get his ministers to synchronise their information and give us one credible story? By the way, does the Ghana National Petroleum Company (GNPC) have any independent source of income apart from the known taxpayer related sources? In other words, when it claims to be the headline sponsor of the Black Stars, the national football team, do we understand it is public money? Is anybody keeping an eye on the stories coming out of the Petrobras scandal in Brazil?
Why is it that when the President is obviously so busy, he still finds time to meddle in matters best left to his appointed ministers? The Daily Graphic published a story of a young man that would fall in the category of what is termed “bright, needy student”, who got good grades but could not find the money to go to Medical School. The President, or is it the Presidency, is reported to have “directed” Ghana Education Trust Fund (GETFund) to sponsor the young man. What happened to the Minister of Education and what happened to the GETFund Board and why is the President directing the Board?
Why was it the Office of the President that announced the appointment of the CEO of Korle Bu Teaching Hospital and the CEO of the Komfo Anokye Hospital when the laws were quite clear these were appointments to be made by the governing boards?
Should we define the job for the President?
