Cap Parliament size at 277 MPs – Constitutional Review Committee report
The Constitutional Review Consultative Committee (CRCC) has recommended that the size of Parliament be capped at 277 elected Members of Parliament.
This follows the submission of its report to President Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo, on December 31.
In its report, the Committee suggested that Article 47 be reviewed to read as “Ghana shall be divided into as many constituencies for election of Members of Parliament as the Electoral Commission may prescribe; however, the number of constituencies shall not exceed two hundred and seventy-seven.”
The Consultative Committee, also recommended that Article 93 of the 1992 Constitution be amended to read as follows: “There shall be a Parliament of Ghana which shall consist of not more than two hundred and seventy-seven elected members.”
The consequence of this is that it is necessary to make significant amendments to Article 47 in order to establish a numerical limit on the number of constituencies that Ghana is required to maintain.
The consultative committee explained that its reasons for the choice of 277 elected members as the maximum number was that: “(a) recommending a lesser number than the existing number will require that certain constituencies be scrapped. The decision on which constituencies to be scrap would involve politicians and their followers, and it is not reasonably expected that a political party would approve that constituencies in its stronghold be scrapped.
“On the other hand, it can be reasonably expected that each political party is more likely to lean towards recommending constituencies in its opponent’s stronghold to be scrapped. This would invariably result in needless acrimony.”
“Not recommending a reduction would therefore be the less acrimonious option; (b) the existing constituencies are already two hundred and seventy-six. As an odd number is to be preferable, we recommend an upper limit of two hundred and seventy-seven.”
The CRCC was tasked to review the 2011 report of the Constitution Review Committee (CRC), review submissions, proposals, and reports on various constitutional review platforms such as Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST), Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA), University of Ghana School of Law, University of Professional Studies Accra (UPSA), Ghana Institute of Management and Public Administration (GIMPA) among others.