Executive Director for Parliamentary Network Africa, Sammy Obeng, has revealed that the censure motion against finance minister, Ken Ofori-Atta, is good for the country’s parliamentary democracy.

According to him, although the minority lost its censure motion to dismiss the finance minister, it has set a precedent on how such motions must be handled. He indicated that the behaviour of members of parliament from both sides of the House also reveals their stance on the issue.

“It helped us to be able to fashion out the process for going through a motion of censure because this is a provision that has been in our constitution since 1992. However, it has not been triggered [and] it has not gone through the full haul like it went through this time around. Even parliament was confused as to how to go about it. It had to take the experience of Speaker Bagbin, the collaboration of the leadership to carve out a process to take this through and I think that was very useful. So, going forward, I think that parliament now knows that there are some areas in its own standing orders it has to work on to accommodate such processes going forward and I think that’s useful for our parliamentary democracy.”
Sammy Obeng

Mr Obeng emphasized that it is also instructive to note it has taken the country 30 years before this particular provision was triggered. With this, he stated that even though the minority did not succeed in what it sought to do, having a minister of state going through the process, with members of parliament wanting to pass a vote of no confidence in him, “at time when his own political party folks had also expressed their lack of confidence in him, completely shows that this is a process that will certainly be etched in our historical records”.

“It may take another set of decades for another similar situation to happen, but this was good for our parliamentary democracy, no doubt about it. Finally, the openness of the process, the fact that we could watch parliamentary proceedings on TV, Facebook live allowed us to measure the voting behavior of our Members of Parliament so that when push came to shove, the matter as important as the economy and how it has been managed and the blame that has been heaped on the finance minister for his lack of performance… I think that it now becomes an arrangement between them and their constituents to explain that the finance minister, in such a terrible economy will still have to stay.”
Sammy Obeng

Censure motion outcome is no surprise

On his part, CDD fellow, Dr John Osae Kwapong, stated that he wasn’t “particularly surprised at the outcome” of the censure motion. This, he explained, is because at some point when some NPP MPs came out publicly to demand the removal of the finance minister, he reckoned they might join their colleagues NDC MPs as part of the censure motion if the President didn’t accede to their request. However, considering the turn of event, he stated that his subsequent thought of the NPP legislators falling back on the matter proved right.

“If you look at the turn of event after their reported meeting with the President and looking at how the process begun playing out, that was when I said I’m not sure they will lend support in terms of votes to the NDC caucus. So, I looked at it and said the outcome will always be predictable, which there will be no support from the NPP MPs and therefore, ultimately the censure motion will fail.”
Dr John Osae Kwapong

Despite the seeming loss of the motion by the minority against the finance minister, Dr Kwapong highlighted that the motion is an in-built political process that allows parliament to still have a say after they’ve given approval to a minister of state. He emphasized that to get a bipartisan vote to censure a minister, it suggests that “it would have to be something seriously egregious” which may be the threshold that will give rise to get NDC and NPP MPs to say they would want to censure a given minister of state.

“What I appreciated about the whole process was that I asked myself what happens when parliament gives their approval to a nominated minister? It seems like there is no post-approval recourse in terms of accountability when it comes to ministers of state after they have given them the nod. It’s up to the appointing authority to decide what to do in the event of any outrageous misconduct on the part of a minister.”
Dr John Osae Kwapong