Last week Friday witnessed the climax of the feuding Members of Parliament over ‘who is who’ in the House.
And when the venerable Speaker Alban Bagbin’s gavel eventually went down, the needless debate that had got our legislators overshooting themselves, politically, ended, though at a joint press conference the spinning would continue to pollute the environment downstream, in confusing less privileged citizens.
Thank God that, at this point, Parliament has become truly Parliament, with consensus as the name of the game responsibly coming to the fore.
In the opinion of the general public, however, it is still intriguing how we brought all this upon ourselves, when our legislators could always refer to the tenets of their honourable vocation in resolving knotty issues that confronted them.
Thank God, again, that they, MPs on both sides, have collectively and at party level apologised to the public, and committed themselves to moving forward by putting Ghana first, instead of party and propaganda.
Back to basics
That we have returned to saner ways of doing national duty is therefore commendable as we all continue to learn, just like our friends in the more developed democracies today.
As we may all agree, there are the textbook, conventional ways of doing national business in the same manner that we get to junctions in life where we must engineer solutions based on consensus.
That is why the [initial] deadlock over Majority and Minority compelled us to come to mutual agreement; and that is also why raging issues, which were already on the floor of the House, would need that same dose of mutual agreement and consensus.
This is important in generating frameworks for the effective generation and management of our natural resources, away from the ‘them’ and ‘us’ tendencies that afflict our political space in this part of the world.
True legislators
That is the enduring cure for healing the ‘galamsey and okada’ way of doing state business conscientiously and responsibly. But that is also the surest way to signal to our political constituencies on the ground that the policies we generate look at collective interests rather than sectional, myopic and ‘Mafioso’ considerations.
Again, that is the only way to tell our constituents that MPs go to Parliament to make laws that inure to the collective interests of the nation and not those of commercial motor bikers who make money by breaking the law or informal economy mine workers who have elected, in the name of ‘democracy’, to bastardise our collective natural resources for sectional benefit.
Appeal
We at the Daily Statesman believe that when we come to that bridge, Ghana again will be focal, so that we all – politicians, farmers, teachers, entrepreneurs, Free SHS boys and girls, traditional and religious groups as well as generations to come – would be the ultimate beneficiaries.
We may also add that while the partying goes on for the new MPs, they should understand that they owe it to themselves to do more than their predecessors did in the next four years, if they must help break that cycle of attrition that afflicts both parties.
That is one of the ways in building a House where institutional memory will be a truly national asset that births the Alban Bagbins, who brought to a relevant finality the viral feud which compelled an intervention from our law-and-order partners in the security agencies.
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