ENTRENCHED PROVISIONS GOOD FOR DEMOCRACY — DERIBA (PAGE 16, FEB 24, 2010)

A public servant in the Upper West Region, Mr David Mwinfor Deribaa, has observed that the current entrenched provisions in the Constitution (Article 78) for the President to appoint more than 50 per cent of his ministers from Parliament was a healthy sign for the promotion of harmony, cooperation and efficiency in government.
This situation is an improvement upon the 1979 Constitution which provided that if a member of Parliament was made a minister, he or she must resign from Parliament.
According to him, this led to the loss of very good and well-educated parliamentarians who vacated their seats to take up ministerial positions thus making the executive position in Parliament weak.
Speaking to the Daily Graphic on a number of issues, Mr Deribaa, who is a land economist by profession, cited the rejection of the 1981 budget of the government of the late President Hilla Limann as an example where many of the parliamentarians were not effective and, therefore, voted against their own bill.
“This was an embarrassment to the then government which needed money to carry out its projects and programmes,” he added.
Dwelling more on separation of powers, Mr Deribaa noted that concentrating power in one and the same hand will eventually lead to tyranny and that the ordinary citizen would suffer since absolute power corrupts absolutely.
He said in Ghana the executive was part of the legislature in law-making and that “parliamentarians who are made ministers do not resign their seats in parliament as was the case under the 1979 Constitution; Parliamentarians must also approve the executive appointments by vetting, among others”.
Ghana, he said, therefore, practises the mixed system of government with an executive president and a cabinet made up of sitting parliamentarians and others who are responsible to the president.
Mr Deribaa said the checks and balances led to overlapping functions between the legislature and the executive to ensure unity, cooperation, understanding and efficiency which were essential ingredients for the development and progress of a country.
He, however, noted that the use of delegated legislation by the executive made the absolute separation of governmental powers impracticable.
The pressure on Parliament and the technical nature of some legislation require that Parliament gives part of its law-making function to a minister to make bye-laws or subsidiary legislation.
“Complete separation of powers of the legislature, executive and the judiciary is only in theory but its desirability and practicability are illusion in any modern constitution. As government is an organic whole, some form of separation is necessary and needed to ensure good governance”, he concluded.