The Supreme Court’s ruling on the voting rights of Deputy Speakers has, again, revealed the best and worst in us as a people.
It was an innocuous, patriotic bid by a private citizen to get the apex court of the land to help us find our way out of an intractable situation. But the result has strangely been a lack of appreciation of the issues on the part of beneficiaries of his courageous initiative, instead of contentment that we have a solution to run with.
President Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo believes the Law Lords gave the nation the best decision, and he cited authorities to bolster that point.
Former President John Dramani Mahama, also lawfully making a comment, only ridiculed the ruling, describing it as ‘dangerous’ and ‘a judgment of convenience’. But that, he sought to create the impression that the judgment by the learned Justices was not based on their reading of the law, but by other motives. How unfortunate!
Interestingly, we have the experts united in saying that, whatever the ruling is, we must go forward, live with it, and make the best out of it. Even the plaintiff, who made history with his initiative, says while he has his personal difficulties with the ruling, he believes we all have an unalloyed obligation to live with because it is coming from the institution mandated to interpret the Constitution.
‘Dangerous’
We all admit that when appointees swear an oath of office, it is essentially to work and act to defend, first, the Constitution and processes, policies and programmes emanating from it.
While we, therefore, agree that former President John Dramani Mahama and the Minority Leader have a right to express different opinions on the ruling, we find the tone of their statements dangerous.
Referring to the ruling as ‘dangerous’ may mean inciting weak-minded, gullible, ignorant and plain lawless folks to ‘revolt’ by using other means to respond when they are confronted with making uncomfortable choices in life.
Indeed, we do not want to believe that the statement made by Mr Mahama is intended to mean the Supreme Court is courting danger. Indeed, we expected him, as a former President and aspiring President, to have laced his statement with a proviso such as “but we must respect the ruling of the Supreme Court.” That is statesman-like and dignified.
Similarly, we expected Minority Leader Haruna Iddrisu not to have ended his statement on the “judicial support for the E-Levy” slant. A civil “but we would, as lawmakers, respect it” would have also served the collective interest of the nation better. .
Our boys/girls watching
How responsible any state or its institutions, including political parties, are is reflected in how such institutions and their leaders are willing to live by the very processes they have crafted for the ordinary citizens.
Intriguingly, the very people they lead know when they are living out the processes or simply skewing them for personal, political and crony gains. And we must not be surprised when they take it to frightening levels that come back at us, as history has repetitively revealed.
The greatest lesson we must all learn is that refusing to live by law or the processes is in no one’s interest – not the leader nor the governed.
Responsibility
Similarly, staying civil under our democratic tenets, like the diplomatic community and development institutions we run to for support, is our bastion in aspiring towards the transformation we want to see in our society.
That responsibility belongs to the leaders, not the ordinary party boy and girl or the innocent citizen in our rural or poor urban settings who is interested in feeling basic, tangible development.
What would we be left with without a Supreme Court – or Legislature and Executive? It will simply be chaos in which there will be no winner and beneficiary, or Mahama and Iddrisu. That is why all of us, especially our leaders, must learn to respect institutions of state and the decisions they made on our behalf, whether we agree with them or not, or whether they favour our interest or not.
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