As the December 7 general election approaches, all political parties in Ghana have been urged to be civil in their utterances during the campaign season and reign in their erring members.
“Let us be civil to one another in language use and let the people of Ghana be our judges,” Mr Osei Kyei-Mensah-Bonsu, the Majority Leader in Parliament, said on Tuesday.
“I would like to appeal to us all to exercise restraint and caution in our campaigning activities since the contest is about ideas, policies and programmes not personalities,” he said.
Mr Kyei-Mensah-Bonsu, also the Leader of Government Business in Parliament, made the appeal in his welcome address during the official opening of the First Meeting of the Fourth and Final Session of the Eighth Parliament of Ghana in Accra.
“Mr Speaker, we are in an election year and I take this opportunity to wish us all well,” he said.
“We must critique ourselves on the efficacy, practicality and sustainability of the policies and programmes that we unveil.”
Quoting the late General Ignatius Kutu Acheampong, Ghana’s former Head of State, he said: “This is our country, we are one people, with a common destiny and we live in one nation and this nation shall continue in perpetuity”.
The Majority Leader urged Ghanaians to be guided in their actions and activities in order not to jeopardise the peace the country enjoyed.
He said the happenings in the sub-region was a clarion call for Members of the House, as political leaders, to do away with actions or inactions that threaten the stability and growth of the nation’s democracy, of which monetisation of the electoral process was at the top of the list.
He said democracy was supposed to yield good dividends to insure to the benefit of the governed, not those governing.
“As a people, as political parties, we should resolve to do away with the humongous monetisation of our politics and rather, come out with policies and programmes that will bring economic benefits and respite to the people of this country,” he said.
Mr Kyei-Mensah-Bonsu recalled some bills passed before Parliament adjourned, to which the President communicated to the House his inability to assent.
He noted that the Speaker, after 10 days of the President’s communication, came with his own prepared statement, which he read to the House.
Upon invitation by the Speaker for the House to comment on his statement, the Majority side, however, declined, he said.
“Parliament has reconvened. We hope the Speaker’s statement shall be made available. If it is available this week, I believe the Majority side, which made the application to be furnished with the statement, would be ready to comment… sometime next week, most probably, Thursday, February 15, 2024.”
He said the shortness of the period for this meeting requires greater diligence in the performance of functions on the part of both Members and Staff.
He said in consultation with the Speaker, the House might have to extend sittings beginning with the third week; declaring that that it might include conscripting Mondays as sitting days.
He appealed to the MPs to rededicate themselves to the Businesses of the House during this meeting.
