Founder of the National Interest Movement (NIM), Dr Abu Sakara
There is “no contradiction between fixing Ghana and fixing the 1992 Constitution”, Dr Abu Sakara Foster, the founder of the National Interest Movement (NIM), a non-partisan civil society organisation that pursues the national interest for the greater common, has said.
The former presidential candidate of the CPP told Blessed Sogah on Class91.3FM’s 505 news programme on Thursday, 5 August 2021, in an interview that the “Constitution is the basis for all other things and if you close all the loopholes and open proper exits for certain actions around a binding vision, you will have much more effective and efficient development with less wastage and that means that you are able to achieve those things that people are crying for and in the order of the priority they are crying for them in a better way”.
That way, Dr Abu Sakara noted, “the element of continuity is taken care of; secondly, there are other things that need to be done, it’s not just the national development plan. You need to limit the excessive powers of the executive, like leaving it with the powers it needs but taking from it the powers and influence it should not have”.
“You should deconcentrate the power of the executive by strengthening independent constitutional bodies in a manner in which they are appointed independently by a known, designated national body, that is also independent of the executive, and they are funded directly through levies and their operations cannot be controlled by the executive”, he proposed.
In his view, “if you do it this way, you won’t have a director of public prosecution who it takes about two years to fund”.
Secondly, Dr Abu Sakara noted, “you have to decentralise development decision-making from the centre to local government but not in the many many local governments that we have today which have no economies of scale”.
“We have to rethink that whole idea and bring the local government to an economy of scale, probably at the level of the existing 16 regions … help them to create up to 30 so that the existing districts will be called sub-districts and local government will be at that level where you have the manpower, you have the economies of scale, and then you can target a certain amount of money to be mandatorily injected into them every year as a revenue something”.
“This is what other people have done; they’ve resisted [the] temptation of collecting all the money between the legs of the minister of finance and then sharing it as and when money becomes available…” he noted.
NIM acts as a think tank in concert with other CSOs as associate members under an umbrella platform.
NIM’s associate members include the National Association of Non-Aligned Voters, United Movement for Change, People’s Democratic Movement, Third Force and Ghana First Platform.
NIM is leading a campaign to “fix our country, and that begins with fixing our Constitution to get the system change we need for a more effective and purposeful pursuit of our nation’s greater good”.
It said in a statement that a “comprehensively reformed Constitution would help to curb parochial pursuits that distort the functioning of our democracy to suit partisan patronage”.
NIM has, therefore, submitted a petition to the Speaker of Parliament to begin a national discourse on a comprehensive amendment of Ghana’s 1992 Constitution.
The movement has asked all Ghanaians to collect as many signatures as possible to support the petition for reform of the 1992 Constitution, as it says after 30 years of multi-party rule under the 4th Republic, Ghana’s democracy has “stagnated into a duopoly that offers no real alternatives to the predicament of a nation unhinged from its big vision”.
“The nation is mired in debt, with an economy moored to supply of raw materials, and tethered to a pattern of public expenditure that exceeds national income”, a statement from the movement said.
“Consequently, results for all the efforts of creating new jobs are woefully behind the continuous growth in numbers of unemployed youth. This is primarily because investment in the economy is mostly dependent on foreign direct investment that prefers the extractive and service industries. It mostly shuns the production sector of the economy where added value is generated, and living wage jobs are created.”
“The cry of the youth to fix the country is not a cry of rebellion; it is a cry for help from the generation of our own children. We must not use the fortunate but fragile circumstances of our personal families to judge the predicament of our youth. Their generation is faced with the greatest challenges generated by the 21st-century civilisation. The plight of Africa’s youth is to bear the greatest price in human and material terms for the transformation of national economies within a continental context”.