Justice Stephen Alan Brobbey
A former Supreme Court judge, Justice Stephen Alan Brobbey says chiefs engaged in active partisan politics should be deposed given the current situation where some of them have failed to adhere to the dictates of the constitution asking that they steer away from the subject.
According to him, Article 276 of the Constitution debars chiefs from engaging in partisan politics because of their special unifying role in society.
He said this when he delivered a lecture at the Rt. Hon. Mike Oquaye Centre for Constitutional Studies at the IEA’s constitutional review dialogue in Accra on Tuesday.
“The chief is a unifier and you are to bring your people together, that’s why anything that happens in the city or town you go to the chiefs palace, but if you organise your life in such a way that you estrange the other political parties the moment you say you support one political party, the logical deduction is that the other people who don’t support your party will say you don’t like them or they don’t like you. You are a divisive character and in my view they should be deposed, and it’s not that those who support these political parties don’t know the consequences,” he said.
He further said that the actions by chiefs to disclose their affiliated parties give room to entrench divisions in society.
He mentioned that considering the challenges faced by the state in an attempt to enforce this provisional arrangement, Ghanaians should consider if they would want a more stringent approach to dealing with the issue in the event that chiefs are still considered as the microcosm of knowledge.
“We put it in and now you are in a better position to decide whether we need this clause, so that you give free range to chiefs to do whatever they like or you need to remove them,” he added.
For her part, former Chief Justice, Sophia Akufo, lauded the efforts of members of the Constituent Assembly who crafted the 1992 Constitution.
By Ebenezer K. Amponsah