Member of Parliament for Effia Constituency, Lawyer Isaac Baomah Nyarko, has revealed that President Mahama cannot sign the much-talked-about anti-LGBTQI bill.
According to him, the President is saddled with international protocols, making it impossible for him to append his signature to the bill to become a law.
In a recent meeting with the Catholic Bishops, President Mahama suggested that the bill should be reintroduced as a government bill rather than a private member’s bill to ensure broader support and consultation with stakeholders.
However, Lawyer Boamah, in an interview on Beach FM, said the reality is the country faces dire consequences from developing partners should the bill be signed.
According to him, “Reality is Ghana frowns on such behaviours. There is no way I, Isaac Boamah Nyarko, will support this LGBTQI issue in Ghana. But how do you deal with it? Is it by legislation like we did, or you can use the existing laws and come up with other preventive measures to curb and to bring these things down? If the good people of Ghana, as we have done, is to pass a bill, the bill has gone through a whole lot of processes.
Now it is before the president. Some people were saying that because the president didn’t sign. Once the bill had gone through the test stage and has been transmitted, it is a bill for presidential assent. It has to be signed.
And I’m telling you the president cannot sign. He will not sign because of the powers behind it: the IMF, the World Bank, and the United States of America.
That’s the truth. We don’t have the capacity. We are not independent economically.
Lawyer Boamah maintained that it is needless to sign the anti-LGBTQI bill if the country cannot protect citizens’ rights.
“So, though those people are there, they are protecting such rights. Now, if we, as a country, cannot protect as a right, you don’t pass anti-bills against them as if you are going after them. And so the the modus operandi was the problem, but everybody is against it.
The Muslim communities against it. The Christian communities against it. The African traditional religion. So as a country, we frown on it . But is it going anti with a bill knowing that their development partners are the ones who are trying to protect the rights of these people?
And we had so much constitutional provisions and legal legislative provisions that we could prosecute anybody under, and not necessarily. So this is where we are, and we wait on President Mahama to see if he can sign it.”
