As calls for a constitutional review gets louder, more pressure mounts on President Akufo-Addo to take action to fix what many appear to believe are flaws in the 1992 constitution.
The 1992 constitution of Ghana is the most enduring, lasting over two decades and earning Ghana the reputation of a beacon of democracy in Africa
Nonetheless, it comes with many challenges that some experts believe can be addressed to make it better.
The calls for a constitutional review did not start recently. Indeed, this chorus has been sang many times by different influential people and credible groups over the years.
Some governments of the past and Nana Akufo-Addo have all made attempts to fix it, but in very different approaches that have not been wholly accepted.
One of the most significant of such attempts was in 2011 when the late former president, John Evans Atta set up a 10-member constitutional review commission to look at the issues.
The Commission spent about $6 million on the elaborate 2-year-long exercise; by far the most comprehensive piece of work or attempt to answer the question on a constitutional review for Ghana.
Although the powers of Prof. Atta Mills and the mandate of the Commission were challenged in court, a majority decision by the court gave green light for the process to continue.
The output of the commission’s work was contained in an over 980-page report submitted to the government at the time, among the proposals being the election of Metropolitan, Municipal and District Chief Executives on partisan lines.
The Commission also recommended the payment of taxes on the salary of the president.
But no further action has been taken on them.
The host of The Point of View, Bernard Avle in an editorial on Monday broke down the issues, highlighted the arguments for and against a review and some of the key recommendations in the report.
He sided with the majority view that the barely 10-year-old document should be revisited, but no new commission should be engaged to start the entire process again, considering the wealth of information in the report, the scale of work by the 2011 commission, and the cost of that venture.
Watch the point of view below:
