The former Member of Parliament for the Tamale Central Constituency, Inusah Fuseini has critiqued the ad hoc committee set up by the Speaker of Parliament to hear the Minister of Finance on the censure motion against him.
The Minority has moved a motion in Parliament to censure the Finance Minister on some 7 grounds that they believe have brought the country’s economy to crisis.
The Speaker of Parliament therefore set up an eight-member ad hoc Committee to probe allegations levelled against the Finance Minister, Ken Ofori-Atta.
Contributing to the topic on Day Break Upper East Show, the former MP who doubles as lawyer said formation of the Committee is not a known parliamentary procedure.
He said, “the Committee itself revealed what I will call the difficulty and changes of having to set up an ad hoc committee with two chairmen and an equal number of members. It’s not a known parliamentary procedure. In parliamentary procedure, you will have to have one chairman and a ranking or a deputy chairman so you will know who is a leader in this Committee. So it is very important that in establishing these things we take the nuances of parliamentary practice into consideration. If not, we are always going to run into difficulties like that but all in all, I think we are learning useful lessons and probably when given another opportunity, might do differently.”
Mr. Fuseini further raised concerns about the terms of reference of the Committee and how decisions could be addressed when there has to be voting because the Committee has equal members from both minority and majority side of parliament
He said “by parliamentary practice and by parity of reasoning, when there is equality of vote on a particular issue and chairman has no casting vote, it becomes stalemate and the motion falls. We didn’t hear the speaker say that there will be a casting vote because we have double chairmen, so who is going to do the casting vote. So in such a situation, the issue will fall.”
He however disagreed with objections raised by counsel for Ken Ofori Atta about the power of parliament to hear cases concerning conflict of interest.
Said parliament has the jurisdiction to do what the constitution mandates and what they are doing is in tandem with the constitution.
Source: A1Radioonline.com|101.1MHz| Samuel Adagom|Ghana
