Majority Leader Mahama Ayariga has defended Parliament’s decision to hold the Bank of Ghana (BoG) Governor’s briefing behind closed doors, accusing the Minority of walking out in pursuit of media attention instead of engaging the central bank governor.
Speaking to journalists after the Minority staged a walkout on Wednesday, July 15, Ayariga said the decision to hold the Committee of the Whole meeting in private was in line with Parliament’s Standing Orders.
He explained that Standing Order 266 provides that committee meetings are held in public unless the committee decides otherwise.
“If you read our Standing Orders, it says in Order 266 that meetings of committees shall be held in public except otherwise determined by the committee. So I asked them to convince the entire committee to sit in public. But if you don’t convince the committee to agree to sit in public, you cannot force a committee to sit in public,” he said.
According to the Majority Leader, although the Minority pointed to a previous occasion when a BoG Governor appeared before Parliament in public, it failed to secure the support of the Committee of the Whole for a similar arrangement before choosing to leave the chamber.
Ayariga also rejected claims that BoG Governor Dr. Johnson Asiama was avoiding scrutiny. He said the Governor had prepared responses to all the questions before Parliament and was ready for the engagement, adding that the information could still be made available to the media afterward.
He argued that if the Minority’s primary concern was accountability, its members would have remained in the chamber to question the Governor rather than walk out.
“They were more interested in the media optics than obtaining answers from the central bank chief,” he said.
The Majority Leader further criticised what he described as the Minority’s failure to follow parliamentary procedures, stressing that changes to the format of committee proceedings must be agreed upon collectively and not imposed by one side.
“If you want to do that, you have to approach us, you have to work with us, and we will all agree that this is how we are going to do it,” he stated.
The Minority walked out after First Deputy Speaker Bernard Ahiafor ruled that the BoG Governor’s briefing to the Committee of the Whole would be held in camera, following objections to the decision to exclude the media from the proceedings.
