Even before parliament reconvenes on Thursday in an emergency call-back to consider the minority New Patriotic Party’s (NPP’s) call for parliamentary probe into the receipt of a Ford Expedition gift by President John Mahama, the majority National Democratic Congress (NDC) and the NPP have taken entrenched positions on the matter.
President Mahama is said to have taken a 2010 Ford Expedition vehicle valued at about $100,000 in 2012 from a Burkinabe contractor, Djibril Kanazoe, after which a number of government contracts were awarded to him (Kanazoe).
Some minority MPs are said to have petitioned parliament to look into the car gift which political pundits claim was in exchange for contracts.
The petition, signed by more than 100 MPs, activated Article 112 (3) of the Constitution which directs that parliament must consider a petition signed by at least one third of the 275 MPs, which translates into less than 100 MPs.
However, the second majority chief whip and NDC Member of Parliament for Banda, Ahmed Ibrahim, in an interaction with a section of the media yesterday, said the minority’s call for a parliamentary probe into President Mahama’s Ford Expedition saga is a complete waste of time and resources because the minority members know that they will never succeed with the impeachment of the president.
“The minority wants President Mahama to be impeached because they know that their flag bearer, Nana Akufo-Addo, cannot defeat President Mahama in any election,” he said.
The minority leader, Osei Kyei-Mensah-Bonsu, in a sharp rebuttal, said the action of the minority is to deepen democratic governance and build consensus on certain important matters which have serious implications on the country’s fledgling democracy.
According to him, the minority had done nothing wrong in asking parliament to constitute a special committee to probe such an important matter.
He said the minority’s action is supported by the Constitution and that this is not the first time the minority had caused parliament to be recalled from recess to consider very important national issues that have serious implications on collective governance.
“We had brought parliament back to probe the sale of Merchant Bank which we thought was against the collective national interest,” he recalled, stressing that President Mahama himself had said that if anybody thinks he has done something wrong by receiving the Ford Expedition vehicle as a gift, that person or group of persons can resort to the Constitution and use the due process for proper investigations to be done on his conduct.
“We first saw this Ford gift issue in the Auditor General’s report and had already made up our minds to look further into that until a journalist also came up with an expose on it; so we are going by the constitutional requirement to have the president properly investigated on this matter and believe most Ghanaians would be happy we did that,” he said.
By Thomas Fosu Jnr