Lawyer Akoto Ampaw continues to systematically and meticulously school ignorant Ghanaian parliamentarians like the National Democratic Congress’ M
Lawyer Akoto Ampaw continues to systematically and meticulously school ignorant Ghanaian parliamentarians like the National Democratic Congress’ Member of Parliament for the Ningo-Prampram Constituency, in the Greater-Accra Region, on exactly who qualifies to lay a Private Member’s Bill in and/or before Parliament. In his latest salvo, the renowned high-powered constitutional law scholar, human and civil rights attorney instructively and constructively enlightens the general Ghanaian public about the fact that under the mandate of Ghana’s 1992 Republican Constitution, it is only the President of the Sovereign Democratic Republic of Ghana and his/her assigns and representatives who is/are authorized under Article 108 of the Constitution to lay the sort of Bill which the 8 Anti-LGBTQ+ Legislators have presently introduced into our National Assembly, which is currently undergoing public readings and hearings (See “Anti-LGTBQ Bill Can’t Be Laid Using Private Member’s Bill – Says Akoto Ampaw” Modernghana.com 11/12/21).
This is because Ghana’s Fourth-Republican Constitution clearly stipulates that in order to be legitimate and/or inviolable, a Private Member’s Bill must be demonstrated not to impinge or interfere with the Consolidated Fund, or the Collective Monetary Wealth or Commonwealth, of the country, as well as any taxpayer-generated funds. The theory and logic here, therefore, is that since the wholesale implementation of the Moses Foh-Amoaning-concocted so-called Promotion of Proper Human Sexual Rights and Ghanaian Family Values Bill, if passed by Parliament, will draw heavily on the resources of the country, primarily in the form of the hired and salaried services of members of the Ghana Police Service (GPS), the Bill, in its present form and shape, flagrantly violates the established laws of the land.
What the gentleman who represented the Akufo-Addo-led ruling New Patriotic Party (NPP) in the post-Election 2020 Mahama-initiated petition is contending here is that if the largely National Democratic Congress-sponsored pushers of the Anti-LGBTQI+ want to play hardball, in mainstream American political parlance, then they had better prepare to be met with the full force and the righteous indignation of firebrand legal lights like Lawyer Akoto Ampaw himself. Even more significantly, Attorney Akoto Ampaw skillfully demonstrates that the radical vigilance of the most knowledgeable Ghanaian lawyers and constitutional scholars is needed to ensure that brash and impetuous political bullies like the National Democratic Congress’ Parliamentary Minority and their grossly misguided allies among the ranks of the New Patriotic Party’s Parliamentary Majority do not take the inalienable civil and human rights of the global Ghanaian community for granted.
In short, we, the entirety of the global Ghanaian citizenry, did not fiercely fight the Jeremiah “Jerry” John Rawlings’ “revolutionary dictatorship” only to have our democratic rights and inalienable freedoms crudely and savagely usurped by the barbaric likes of the Sam Georges of our National House of Representatives. He does not categorically say it, although it is crystal and unmistakably clear that left to his own individual discretion, Lawyer Akoto Ampaw would have the constituents of the Parliamentarians who have, literally, been carrying dirty water for Mr. Foh-Amoaning, the Oxbridge-schooled chucklehead who has been spearheading the campaign for the Promotion of Proper Human Sexual Rights and Ghanaian Family Values, to begin recall proceedings against each and every one of these autocratic bipartisan parliamentarians who have viciously elected to make life ungovernable or a Living Hell for the members of the LGBTQ+ community.
All freedom- and democracy-loving Ghanaians must not simply stop at just fiercely resisting these genocidal and unprovoked political and ideological bullies; we must also fiercely push back and thoroughly run them out of the public square and the neoliberal democratic market of progressive ideas and salutary and constructive national development. Indeed, even as Prof. Henry Kwasi Prempeh, spokesperson for the Human Rights Coalition and Executive-Director of the Ghana Center for Democratic Development (CDD), perspicuously intimates, the Anti-LGBTQ+ Bill criminally attempts to preclude the members of the latter indigenous Ghanaian community from the immutable and inalienable protection of the country’s 1992 Republican Constitution which, in effect, is tantamount to the treasonous and heinous overthrow of the postcolonial Modern Sovereign Democratic Republic of Ghana.
As well, it is inexcusably absurd for religious community leaders like Mr. Peter Kaba, described as an Elder of the Pentecost Church of Ghana, to cavalierly presume that they can impose their sectarian dogmatic philosophical and foreign-acquired values on the rest of the Ghanaian citizenry, unwisely ignoring the fact that the so-called indigenous Ghanaian moral and cultural values are not synonymous with their foreign-acquired Christian or Christocentric values. As well, these self-infatuated leaders expediently and conveniently fail to recognize the scientifically unproven fact of the authorship of the Bible as the sole source of Divine Afflatus or the unarguable manifestation of the thought, teachings and the Word of God. Actually, what I really wanted to observe here is the stark and fundamental fact that Ghana is first and foremost not a Constitutional Theocracy, although the overwhelming majority of Ghanaian citizens describe ourselves as both nominal and practicing Christians.
*Visit my blog at: KwameOkoampaAhoofeJr
By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., PhD
English Department, SUNY-Nassau
Garden City, New York
November 13, 2021
E-mail: okoampaahoofekwame@gmail.com
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