The Constitution Review Commission (CRC) made a number of recommendations in its report. Subsequently, some were accepted, others, not, by the government’s white paper. Those that were accepted required amendments to both (some) entrenched and non-entrenched provisions of the Constitution, 1992.
As we have all been made aware by now, amending an entrenched provision required going through mandatory laid down rules, including, conducting a referendum. So, granted we had about 20 or more different entrenched provisions to amend in the Constitution, it means we have to agree on how to conduct the amendment (referendum) exercise for all the over 20 questions. Thus, we either adopt the piecemeal approach or do it en bloc.
Now imagine we adopted the en bloc method of conducting the referendum on the over 20 entrenched provisions of the Constitution, how possible is it to determine a national consensus on each of the over 20 questions prior to the referendum? Difficult, if not impracticable, right?
Okay. Let’s look at the piecemeal approach here too. How do we do it? That, for each scheduled specific referendum, while spending your taxes on the referendum campaign, the President gauges the pulse of the nation for consensus on the repeal as well, when the president thinks and decides that there is no consensus, the entire scheduled referendum is aborted. Never mind, how much of your taxes was spent on the campaign.
Then, the President goes to the next referendum question, goes through same process, spends your taxes again on huge campaigns, until the president realises again that our saviour consensus is missing, hence, aborts the process. Of course, we keep doing this till sunset. Obvious dissipation of the resources of the state; while pregnant women continue to sleep on the floor of the hospitals for lack of beds, the young and old get drowned and die at the least rainfall for lack of properly planned drainage systems, etc. Clearly, it will be strange to me if this was the intention of the framers of the Constitution, 1992.
And, this is the reason why the more I think about Nana Akufo-Addo’s reasoning – lack of consensus – for aborting the referendum, the more I am convinced our problems keep multiplying. This can’t be a good precedent for today and the future. Indeed, and again, we are truly yet to come to the understanding that we have a nation to build.
Shalom.
