Over 60 Articles Touched: CRC Proposals Are Substantial Revision, Not A Tweak - Professor Abavare

The President of the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST) Chapter of the University Teachers Association of Ghana (UTAG), Professor Eric KK Abavare, has conducted what he calls a "Deviation Audit" to measure how far the Constitution Review Committee (CRC) has strayed from the 1992 Constitution.

In the Week 4 edition of his ongoing review of the CRC Report titled *"The Deviation Audit: How Far Has The CRC Strayed From 1992?"*, Prof. Abavare says over sixty Articles of the 1992 Constitution have been touched, with six clusters falling into 'fundamental departure' territory and one constituting a near-reversal.

"Three weeks in, one pause is useful. This week's column stops walking through the State's branches and asks a plain question: How far, exactly, has the Constitution Review Committee travelled from the 1992 document that Ghanaians actually ratified? Not in rhetoric. In text," he writes.

Prof. Abavare said he sat down with the CRC Report and the 1992 Constitution open side by side, having printed the large volume of pages and bound them at his own cost, and set every major proposal against the specific Article it seeks to change.

According to him, each proposal was scored on two things: a qualitative label - Minor tweak, Substantial change, Fundamental departure, or Reversal of a core principle - and a rough 0-to-10 'distance from 1992' score.

"It is not a scientific instrument. It is a citizen's yardstick, offered so that you can build your own version at home," he explained.

He said the picture that emerged surprised him.

"Five of the Report's nine clusters land squarely in 'fundamental departure' territory: One Local Government is a near-reversal of the 1988/1992 settlement. The vesting of public lands in the President is proposed to be overturned outright. So is the appointment of MMDCEs by the President. So is the President's tax exemption. So is the ban on dual-citizen MPs," Prof. Abavare noted.

In aggregate, he scores the Report at about 7 on a 0-to-10 scale.

"That is not a tweak. It is a substantial constitutional revision — bigger than any single amendment since 1996, smaller than a wholesale rewrite. The Committee has stayed within the four corners of the 1992 document. But it has moved a great deal of furniture around inside those corners," he stated.

Prof. Abavare cautioned that the verdict has real consequences, arguing that a revision of this size cannot be delivered entirely through the CRC's proposed 'semi-entrenched' shortcut of a 75 per cent parliamentary vote.