Constitution review exercise very necessary — Adei

Political Page
16-01-10

THE immediate past Rector of the Ghana Institute of Management and Public Administration (GIMPA), Prof Stephen Adei, has described the proposed constitutional review as highly necessary in view of some shortcomings in the 1992 Constitution.
He said the framework (Constitution) of the nation, which was the reference point of the country’s laws, had to be put in the right shape to meet current challenges.
“Reviewing the Constitution is not rewriting the whole Constitution. It is only identifying some areas that need to be changed,” he said in an interview with the Daily Graphic in Accra yesterday.
Prof Adei said although it was not good to be changing the Constitution every now and then, there was the need “to calibrate it in areas that had shortfalls to make it more efficient”.
He said, for instance, that elections should not be held every four years and that there should be a one presidential term of seven years to provide an uninterrupted period for a President to prosecute his agenda.
“I believe that things like the appointment of Council of State members where so much proportion is given to the President alone is wrong,” he said, noting that there was the need to improve the current system.
Prof. Adei suggested an independent Council of State into which members would be elected, while there would be representatives from bodies like the Ghana Bar Association, the Ghana Academic of Arts and Sciences, among others, to advise the President.
He said probably the Council of State should have little teeth like the House of Lords in Britain.
He disagreed with Prof. Kofi Kumado that the $3 million to be used for the exercise be used on rural development.
Prof Kumado had said in the face of the massive problems and deprivations the majority of Ghanaians suffered on a daily basis, the money to be spent would constitute a gross misuse of public funds on an exercise “which can only be self-indulgence by the literate”.
In a letter to the Editor of the Daily Graphic in reaction to the government’s intention to carry out a review of the 1992 Constitution, Professor Kumado questioned the basis for a referendum just about a year before parliamentary and presidential elections.
“What sort of prioritisation is this?” he questioned.