Minority walks out of Parliament over new regions Act

By Papisdaff Abdullah

The Minority in Ghana’s Parliament has staged its first walk out of the third meeting for second time in the seventh Parliament. The National Democratic Congress (NDC) Mps walked out during the adoption of the Constitutional Instrument, CI, for the creation of 6 new regions in protest of the Speaker’s refusal to recognize some members from their side including minority leader Haruna Iddrisu and Adaklu Member of Parliament Kwame Agbodza Governs.

The Adaklu legislator had wanted to raise the issue of lack of adequate numbers in the house for a decision on the subsidiary legislation committee’s report on the creation of the 6 new regions. According to minority chief whip Muntaka Mubarak, the Adaklu MP wanted to draw speaker’s attention that the House did not have quorum to take a decision on the CI.

Muntaka Mubarak said “ So if the speaker is crowding the space for us to be able to even do our work, then we have no business there. Use the procedures that we have, but you can’t just with the greatest respect, abuse the rules, abuse the constitution, and expect the minority to continue to sit there. Democracy comes with checks and balances, democracy is not just mob action.” Accusing the speaker of intolerance.

“You have numbers so you just do what you want. Some of these things are so important such that in many parliaments, they no longer even use voice votes again. They want the recording constituency by constituency and our machine has that facility so that you see how every constituency has voted but we are not using it. We continue to use voice votes, even when the rules provide that after the voice votes you can call for the other actions you won’t be allowed to do it. It becomes so worrying, it becomes so frustrating that you just don’t know what to do than to have this spontaneous walkout,” Muntaka said.