A former minister, Mr Hackman Owusu-Agyemang, has described a recommendation to allow the President to choose all his ministers outside parliament as "academic, utopian and unworkable".
He has, therefore, kicked against the recommendation and put up a spirited defence of the current practice of appointing 50 per cent of ministers from parliament.
According to Mr Owusu-Agyemang, who is also a former Member of Parliament for New Juaben North, MPs in the government of the day are the best people to implement their party's manifesto because they are the ones who sell the party's ideas during elections.
He was in a telephone interview with the Daily Graphic
reacting to recommendations by a nine-member Constitutional Review Commission to amend Article 78 (I) of the 1992 Constitution.
Article 78(1) states: "Ministers of State shall be appointed by the President with the prior approval of Parliament except that the majority of Ministers of State shall be appointed from among Members of Parliament."
According to proponents of the recommendation, the current practice is making MPs powerless in checking the executive.
But Hackman Owusu-Agyemang, who was appointed the Foreign Minister from January 2001 to April 2003 and became the Minister for Interior for two years, and Minister for Water Resources, Works and Housing from 2005 until 2007, all in President J.A. Kufuor’s administration, described the recommendation as an "absolute illusion."
He dismissed claims that the recommendations would make Parliament stronger, saying “as long as a government has majority of MPs coming from the ruling party, the executive will always have its way.”
According to the former MP, with his 12 years of legislative experience, the reality in African Parliaments is that people elect MPs not on the law these MPs propose to make but on their (the MPs) party's manifesto promises which are mainly infrastructural.
Parliament, in the view of Mr Owusu-Agyemang, can never check the executive because “all over the world, the executive often have their way.”
"This so-called checks and balances thing is illusionary. It will never happen. Hardly do you get any NDC MP kicking against the President," Mr Owusu-Agyemang declared.
He recalled how parliament was postponed three times because the executive could not provide funds.
Meanwhile, MPs are reported to be divided over the appointment of ministers from Parliament.
According to media reports, Members of Parliament are sharply divided on the recommendation by the CRC, giving free hand to the President to appoint majority of his ministers from outside Parliament.
