Steps taken by the Minority Members of Parliament to get President John Mahama investigated and subsequently impeached for his controversial acceptance of a car gift from a Burkinabé contractor will only waste the time of the New Patriotic Party (NPP) as campaigns intensify for this year’s elections, Dr Edward Brenya, a political science lecturer at the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST), has said.
According to him, the Minority does not have the numbers to succeed in the ambition to probe and remove the president from office, adding that even in the event that they get the numbers, they could not be sure that all their members would turn up to vote in the process.
The Minority in parliament will on Thursday, 1 September move a motion for a probe into circumstances that surrounded the gifting of a Ford Expedition to Mr Mahama by Mr Djibril Kanazoe, who, in turn got a number of contracts from the government of Ghana.
The opposition MPs filed the motion after getting over 100 signatures of their members to compel the Speaker of the house to summon legislators from recess. Parliament was originally expected to resume sitting in late September.
Speaking in an interview with Chief Jerry Forson, host of Ghana Yensom on Accra100.5FM on Monday August 29, Dr Brenya said: “You are going into an election to attempt to unseat an incumbent party. Instead of focusing on the real campaign and getting the numbers you need to win the elections, you are trying to impeach the president in a process we know very well that you need two-thirds of the house to be successful. But your number is not up to that two-thirds. Even if you had that number, you would not be sure that all your members will turn out to vote for this impeachment process.”
“Is it that they just want to make noise for Ghanaians to know that the NPP has people in parliament or they believe that the impeachment will succeed? I see it as a distraction from their own campaign because the time being used to attempt the impeachment is the time they [NPP] could have returned to the campaign trail and campaigned well to unite the party for Election 2016.”
Source: Ghana/AccraFM.com
