Majority Leader, Osei-Kyei Mensah-Bonsu, says the Speaker of Parliament, Alban Bagbin’s directive to the Finance Minister to leave the Chamber was a deliberate attempt to humiliate him.
To him, that was a disrespect to their side which they will not tolerate, adding that the conduct was appaling.
His position, he said, stems from the fact that the General Secretary of the National Democratic Congress, Asiedu Nketia was still seated.
The Majority walked out after the Speaker on Friday directed Ministers of State, who are non-Members of Parliament (MPs), to vacate the Chamber to allow MPs to take a division vote on whether the Finance Minister should be allowed to further engage the House or not.
“You cannot engage in illegality to legalise your illegality because you think the people who were supposed to be there were not; what the Speaker did was unprecedented.
“The Minister submits a prayer to you that he wants to engage further and even when we had agreed in your Chamber, you come to say you will leave it to the plenary to decide and order the minister who came up with the prayer out?” he quizzed in an interview on Accra-based GTV.
Mr Mensahi-Bonsu, who is also the Minister for Parliamentary Affairs, maintained that it was the lobbies that needed to be cleared and not the Chamber which included where the Finance Minister was seated.
“It has never happened in the history of Parliament that ministers are present and voting is going on and the Speaker marches them out.
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“Without any provocation, he tells him [Finance Minister] that if you don’t go, I will call the marshalls on you for what offence. So you could see clearly a Speaker who was determined to humiliate the Finance Minister and we will not stand that,” he lamented.
Defending their walkout, he added, “We did not walk out never to come back.”
However, Parliament ended up rejecting the 2022 budget in the absence of the Majority caucus.
Listen to the Majority Leader in the audio above:
