President John Dramani Mahama has revoked the appointments of all Metropolitan, Municipal, and District Assemblies (MMDAs) members, just a day into his new administration.
While the decision has raised eyebrows, Private Legal Practitioner Nana Yaw Osei has pointed out that the President’s actions are, in fact, a direct result of the bad precedent set by his predecessor, former President Nana Addo Dankwa Akuffo Addo.
According to Nana Yaw Osei, President Mahama’s decision to revoke the appointments is based on the Local Governance (Amendment) Act, 2017, Act 940, which was enacted by the Akuffo-Addo administration.
This law, which was widely criticized at the time of its passage, allows the President to terminate appointments of President-Appointed members of the MMDAs at will, without having to fulfill the previously stringent conditions set out in the Local Governance Act, 2016 (Act 936).
“The President uses the law [Local Governance (Amendment) Act, 2017, Act 940] enacted by the Akuffo-Addo Administration to revoke the appointments of President-Appointed members of the MMDAs,” Nana Yaw Osei explained. “This is a clear case of ‘what goes around comes around’.
The New Patriotic Party(NPP) government, under President Akuffo-Addo, set a bad precedent by enacting this law, and now they are reaping the consequences.”
In a Facebook post, Nana Yaw Osei emphasized that the amendment to Act 936, which was enacted in January 2017, has led to a culture of impunity and disregard for the rule of law in the local government sector. He described this legislation as “myopic” and argued that it has led to mismanagement in the local government sector.
“This piece of myopic legislation allowed the President to once again terminate, at will, persons appointed to the Assemblies when they had not served their full terms and had not committed any wrong(s) to be removed,” he said.
Nana Yaw Osei, a former Assembly member for eight years, stressed that Section 10(9) of Act 936 was clear in its provisions, effectively disabling a President from terminating appointed members without allowing them to serve their full term.
“Section 10(9) of Act 936 effectively disenabled a President, on assumption of office, from offloading President- appointed members, but to allow them to serve their full term”.
He further stated that the law stipulates the following conditions for revoking appointments:
- Grounds for Revocation: The MMDAs by a recommendation of three-fourths of the members of the MMDA on grounds that a member has
- Systematically neglected the duties as an appointed member of the MMDA; or
- Committed acts incompatible with the office, as a member of the MMDA for which sufficient evidence is available; or
- - Complaints and Investigations: Alternatively, a revocation can be made “upon a complaint of wrongdoing or improper conduct, established to be true after an investigation by an ad-hoc committee of the MMDA”.
Source: www.kumasimail.com/ Kwadwo Owusu
