Author: Kay Codjoe, Market Research Consultant and Volunteer Associate at the IMANI Centre for Policy and Education

One evening during the E-Levy debate, a tomato seller at Makola reportedly asked a simple question after hearing Parliament arguing loudly on the radio: “So they discussed all this without asking us first?”

That question was more intelligent than half the speeches delivered during the national chaos that followed. Because by the time many ordinary Ghanaians fully understood what the Electronic Transfer Levy meant, the political machinery had already moved deep into combat mode.

Parliament became a battlefield. MPs nearly exchanged blows. The country polarized instantly. Citizens protested. Businesses warned of consequences. Mobile money agents panicked. Yet throughout the entire spectacle, one uncomfortable truth sat quietly in the middle of the room:

Too many Ghanaians felt the law was being done to them rather than developed with them. The moment some politicians win elections, they begin behaving like citizens accidentally donated their brains alongside their ballots.

Suddenly, an MP no longer represents people. He represents “wisdom.” Cabinet no longer governs cautiously. It governs prophetically. Parliament transforms into a national boarding school where ordinary citizens must sit quietly while lawmakers and ministers “know what is best for us.”

Then every four years, these same politicians return wearing funeral-white humility, carrying giant smiles and folded hands like repentant choir boys seeking spiritual renewal from the very people whose opinions they ignored for forty-eight uninterrupted months.

That is the dangerous distortion sitting quietly inside parts of Ghana’s democratic culture. Representation has quietly mutated into political outsourcing. Vote for them once, and some assume they have acquired a renewable four-year license to think on your behalf, speak on your behalf, legislate on your behalf, and occasionally suffer on your behalf too.

Meanwhile, consultation becomes cosmetic. A few rushed stakeholder meetings. Then suddenly, the government claims “extensive engagement has been conducted.” Conducted with whom?

Ceiling fans? Because many citizens only discover major laws after Parliament has already massaged, approved, and packaged them into legal destiny. And the data is devastating.

Ghana’s Parliament currently has 276 MPs elected for renewable four-year terms. Yet Afrobarometer data shows that 85% of Ghanaians say MPs “never” or only “sometimes” listen to what ordinary people have to say. Only 14% believe MPs often or always listen to citizens.

Yet the same surveys show most Ghanaians still strongly support democratic accountability and expect elected leaders to listen to voters rather than simply decide what is “best” on their behalf.

So the problem is not that citizens hate democracy. The problem is that Parliament increasingly behaves like democracy ends immediately after swearing-in ceremonies.

Article 106 of the Constitution may require bills to pass through parliamentary procedures, but publication is not participation. Gazetting a bill quietly before Parliament is not consultation.

Uploading PDFs into bureaucratic darkness is not civic engagement. An MP is not a temporary owner of the public mind. A minister is not a constitutional prophet descending from Mount Cabinet with sacred legislative tablets.

The citizen is not supposed to wake up every morning like a confused tenant inside a republic being renovated without permission. If democracy means anything, then lawmaking must become radically participatory, transparent and continuously consultative.

Otherwise, Parliament risks becoming exactly what many citizens already suspect: A very expensive talking shop where the people speak last, hear late, and suffer first.