The Speaker of Parliament, Alban Bagbin, has indicated that it is not within the Speaker’s constitutional role to dictate where Members of Parliament (MPs) should sit in Parliament.

This follows the Speaker declaring four seats vacant making the NDC MPs Majority in Parliament. The decision was however suspended by the Supreme Court. But both sides of the House maintain they are the majority.

This compelled the NPP MPs to stage a walkout in Parliament in protest over the NDC MPs occupying seats traditionally reserved for the majority party.

Speaker Bagbin noted that Ghana’s Constitution does not specify the seating positions for majority or minority members, leaving the determination of majority status to be based solely on numbers.

“It is not part of the duties of a speaker to decide where an MP should be in parliament. That determination in Ghana’s Constitution doesn’t exist. In various parliaments, these things we are talking about; majority and minority don’t exist any longer. That is why in my ruling, I used the term old school, which is the British model; the government and opposition,” he stated.

He explained that while parliamentary conventions often position the majority to the Speaker’s right and the minority to the left, this arrangement is not mandated by law.

Instead, it is a legacy practice rooted in the “old school” British model, where government and opposition members are typically seated on opposing sides.

Speaker Bagbin noted that in other parliaments, the labels of majority and minority no longer hold the same physical positioning significance.

"…You can sit anywhere, but the numbers determine who is the majority and who is the minority. In our Parliament, the practice is for those who constitute the majority to sit on the right side of the Speaker and those who constitute the minority to sit on the left side of the Speaker.

“That is because, after independence in 1957, we adopted the Westminster system, which is practiced in the United Kingdom. But we changed that even to the extent that the arrangement on the floor of the house is in a horseshoe. So, it is not always the case that the people to the left side are all members of a minority, that is not the case now and there is good reason,” he stated.