Variation in performance among members of parliament: evidence from Ghana --------------------Hon. Inusha Fuseini is awesome ------------------------------- In their day-to-day roles, MPs in Ghana are subjected to very strong contradictory pressures by their constituents to supply public, community and private goods. This puts enormous pressures on MPs to be responsive to constituents’ needs and priorities. The ability of an MP to effectively manage these pressures and establish equilibrium within the three (3) demands provides a much stronger accountability relationship between the MP and his constituents and thereby leads to positive development outcomes. Most MPs in Ghana fall short in this regards as they are unable to balance the wheal between these three. The best most of them are able to do is to provide just only one of the goods, especially the private goods. In fact a lot of them are not able to provide any of the goods at all. They provide nothing to their constituents! This distinguishes selfless MPs from selfish MPs. Evidence from field survey on performance of MPs in Ghana confirms this. Hon. Inusha Fuseini, one of Ghana’s finest MPs, a highly competent and committed minister of the current administration, Minister of Lands and Natural Resources was found to be outstanding MP in Ghana who is able to balance the wheal by providing public goods (executive oversight, scrutiny of legislation and making of public policy), community goods (e.g. roofing sheets for the school, a public toilet, street light etc.) and also private goods (e.g. paying of school fees, hospital bills and so on) to his constituents. A research relying on a random selection of citizens in ten strategically selected constituencies in Ghana was conducted to measure political survival strategies employed by members of Ghanaian legislatures with the aim to find out on how much of various types of goods MPs in Ghana supply to their constituents. The research findings of the ability of the MP for Tamale Central in providing relatively high level of everything across board in a highly clientelistic environment left the lead researcher, Prof. Staffan Linberg, a renowned political sociologist in African politics with puzzle! So he asked the following questions with regard to the MP: Why did the MP feel the need to pursue an across-the-board strategy? How was it possible to pursue the provision of collective and club goods in a highly clientelistic environment? Why did the provision of private goods not crowd out other strategies? Has the incumbent found innovative ways of combining these strategies or even allowing for private goods provision to somehow assist in the provision of club and collective goods in the eyes of the citizens? These are questions that necessitate a closer investigation into the dynamics of politics in this particular constituency, Tamale Central. These questions are left for us to answer. In order to answer these questions, it is important we look back to the massive transformation the MP brought into the mining sector since he assumed office as the minister of Lands and Natural Resources. It is also important we cast our mines back to community projects such as the refurbishment of Ambariya School and other projects in his constituency and above all his competence and excellence in both the academia and politics.
Posted on: Fri, 11 Apr 2014 16:08:19 +0000
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