For the past couple of days, I have been scratching my baldie looking for some lawmaking duty that surpasses working on the motherland’s akɔnhoma sika (budget). In fact, it’s not just working on it, but doing so with dispatch. It’s been a nightmare of one chosen to organise budget approval activity to abandon post and disappear to create confusion.
I have also been worryingly searching for answers to why someone elected to make laws would carry a sharp object that can wound another person to a house for making laws, to, in a spectacle of a melee, unlawfully harm a colleague with that object.
Both characters belong to the congress fold, a fold, which cares not being labelled as an epitome of nimo din bɔne (of infamy or bad name). Our elders say: ‘Nimo anntumi wo a, ɛtete wo ntoma. Ntomateteɛ ne sɛ yɛbɛto aba apam wɔn afi mmrahyɛbadwafie hɔ.’ Infamy would tear your cloth into shreds if it’s unable to destroy you. Tearing cloth in the parliamentary context is voting out of parliament.
They say, if you fail to correct the child, he would grow to fail. Some of my compatriots thought it was a joke when congress people meant for a house of civility went sneaking to nicodemously steal the majority seating arrangement in the house. Today, they should know that, at least, one carried a harmful implement into the chamber with the intention to harm someone inside that sacred chamber. And that criminally intent individual actually used the implement to cause harm to another who had gone inside there to legitimately participate in business he had been sent there to do.
Disruptor congress Konongo kaya was at its worst. As a group, they have vowed they are in no way prepared to allow anyone else to govern for development. That is in spite of the fact that they don’t know how to govern to advance the motherland in development. Despite the group’s inability and incompetence in development-oriented governance, they are determined not to allow anyone else to perform that task. It’s the defeatist attitude with which they have been plundering our commonwealth motherland resources into their private pockets.
What happened in opposing revenue mobilisation by the government was an opposition’s uncalled for violent reaction using raggamuffin, mobbing tactics unbefitting of actions that are expected to be honourable. As a group in opposition, congresspeople have done everything despicable, including attacking symbols of state (mace and speaker’s chair) to drag the name of the motherland in the mud. It’s a real shame symbols which deserve respect can so easily be susceptible to desecration by the congresspeople unschooled in appropriate behaviour in the lawmaking business.
Obviously, the trouble with the congresspeople group is that majority of its members can’t be shamed or embarrassed enough. That is a threat to democracy which democracy must deal with by never voting them in the numbers that give them the clout they are mismanaging now. Their actions show they are being duty derelict with their accomplice in speaking dereliction.
In a certain parliament, there were the subtleties of a substantive speaker absenting herself for a hatchet man deputy speaker, (which irked and irritated me, anyway), to lead pass outrageous pieces of legislation. The notorious STX loan and the bill increasing the number of constituencies three months to election were thus tactically passed. The tactics were pale, though, compared to the crude tactics of the current ways.
There’s a strong temptation to invoke someone’s coup words of ‘bogus’ speaker who forgot to apply his long parliamentary practice experience. Unless, of course, the practice was more about seeking partisan gains than approaching business in the house as a national assignment.
Anytime I write, congresspeople know no shame and can never be embarrassed in tantrum throwing and even physically hitting people enough, some think I am being over uncharitable. Yet, I am sure not a single one of those critics would not consider the latest brawl or fracas or pugilistic display unacceptable.
When criminals find their way into a house that is charged with the responsibility to make rules to check criminality, lawful citizens are wont to leave the house with bodily harm inflicted on them by the criminals. The latter enter the house armed with the criminal intent of using those arms against their innocent opponents. To emotionally react in a rational debate, even to the point of raising a hand on another, may be pardonable and forgiven as being human. But to knowingly carry an object of harm to intentionally cause harm must be subjected to criminal treatment.
People joke about seat so safe if you put a dog forward it would be voted for. So tempting but frightening to say it could be a dog was actually put forward and was voted for, regardless, for it to behave like the dog that it is on the floor of the house.
No matter which way one would like to look at it, what happened at a house of lawmaking was an unmitigated disaster. It was dereliction of duty at the highest order by whoever has been assigned to run the place. It’s most unhelpful to the image making of the motherland. It has imputed disrepute.
I wish I knew where and when I will see the democracy maturity in speaker objectivity and nonpartisanship that was envisaged when a speaker who was not of the majority was first elected. As for whoever was supposed to have betrayed a party by not voting for the party’s speaker candidate, I hope there’s no self cursing of stars ongoing. There could be agonising suffering in silence whether there were some silver shekels exchange for a vote or a venting of spice at a frail candidate, or for some bucolic ethnic reason.
Congresspeople’s contempt for my well-meaning compatriots remains unimaginable. Time and again, they have shown their disregard for what is important to my compatriots and the motherland. I stand by my conviction in my prediction that either they get voted into oblivion or they’ll keep thwarting attempts to move the motherland beyond lower middle income to anything higher than that. All they pride themselves in doing is work to pull the motherland down by diverting her resources from the common good into their dirty private pockets.
By Kwasi Ansu-Kyeremeh