Article 71 is wrong – Prof Adei

Professor Stephen Adei, former Rector of the Ghana Institute of Management and Public Administration (GIMPA) has described as “wrong and totally foreign”, the enjoyment of a different condition of service by Article 71 office holders as against other public sector workers.

He said in all jurisdictions, the conditions of service of top level public officers was linked to that of other public sector workers and not the current Ghanaian situation where top officers in the Article 71 category enjoyed astronomically high packages as against what was given other public sector workers.

He said the implementation of the Article 71, which offered a different condition of service to such office holders as against other public sector workers, was wrong, totally foreign and unknown in the world.

He was speaking at a roundtable on the topic: “Determining of Emoluments – A Critique of Article 71 of the 1992 Constitution” organized by the Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA) in Accra on Wednesday.

The Article 71 of the country’s 1992 Republican Constitution creates and defines the conditions of service in terms of salaries, emoluments and privileges to top level officials of the three arms of government, allowing Members of Parliament (MPs) to approve those of the President and other members of the executive whilst the President also approves for the MPs.

Professor Adei, who is an Economist and Leadership Expert, said the conditions of service of the Chief Justice (CJ) and Justices of the Superior Courts of the Judiciary should be separate from Article 71 office holders and appropriately dealt with in accordance with the Chapter 11 on the Judiciary of the Constitution.

He argued that: “In all Common Law countries, the Chief Justice is the highest paid public servant” adding, the inclusion of the CJ and Justices of the Superior Courts of the Judiciary among the beneficiaries of the Article 71, was unhealthy to ensuring the independence of the judiciary.

He said the inclusion of the CJ and Justices of the Superior Courts as well as “Heads of Good Governance Guarantor Institutions” among the beneficiaries of the Article 71, was like mixing apples with pears because such officers enjoyed tenured terms of office and their appointment was on merit unlike the legislature and the executive who occupied elective positions.

He also raised issues with full-time and part-time office holders saying their emoluments should be made a proportion of what their corresponding full-time colleagues enjoyed to avoid the payment of huge salaries to such office holders.

He was also not happy that the Article 71 was not explicit in defining what constituted emoluments saying this left room for wide interpretation.

Professor Adei did not leave out the issue of appointment of the Committee that makes recommendations for the determination of the emoluments of the Article 71 office holders saying the Constitution failed to draw parameters as to who qualified to serve on it (Committee) leaving the President with options to appoint “cronies” as members as was evidenced in the Chinery Hesse Committee.

He said the approval process of the recommendations by the Committee was also fraught with issues saying it also put too much pressure on the MPs to demonstrate selflessness, integrity, leadership and public spiritedness.

He said: “the executive and parliament in public service should be among the highest paid public officials because of the responsibility, integrity and ethics required of them. However, that should not degenerate to an open-ended license to fix one’s own conditions de-facto”.

He said the current practice rendered Article 71 weak and called for the reversal of the trend.

He said the ongoing Constitutional review exercise offered a window of opportunity to address the weaknesses of the Article 71.

Professor Adei called on the Professor Ewurama Addy Committee constituted to work on the emoluments under the Article 71 to learn from the weaknesses of the Article to ensure the anomalies were corrected.

Professor Ivan Addae Mensah, former Vice-Chancellor of the University of Ghana, who chaired the event, said there was the need to review the law to ensure fairness in public sector administration.

Source: GNA