Members of the Minority on the Appointments Committee of Parliament staged a walkout on the vetting of the nominee for the Foreign Affairs Ministry, Alhaji Mohammed Mumuni. The boycott followed a long-drawn debate on whether the vetting of the nominee could proceed against the backdrop of an active court issue on an Auditor General’s report which implicated him. A proposal put up in support of the vetting of Alhaji Mumuni was that it would be prejudicial for the committee to go ahead and make references to the report as the courts were yet to make a determination on the matter. “Nobody shall be pronounced guilty until he is proven guilty. So once he has not been proven guilty, what it simply means is that we set aside this [case] we go on with our vetting, go through it and if later the court decides that the fellow is guilty of the offence then the President who has nominated the person takes it up,” Dominic Azumah, MP for Garu Tampane argued. “The basic qualification to be a minister is to qualify to be a Member of Parliament and nobody could have stopped the nominee from picking a form to contest as a member of parliament,” he emphasised. The MP for Prampram, E.T. Mensah, pushed further with another dimension to the matter. What perhaps became another prop to the argument of the Majority was that the report had not been laid before Parliament to determine the veracity or otherwise of the document. The ruling of the chairman of the Appointments Committee Doe Adjaho that the nominee could be vetted generated a mix of boos and angry protests that sent members of the Minority staging a walkout led by the Ranking Member of the committee, Osei Kyei Mensah Bonsu. Earlier, the MP for Abuakwa South, Atta Akyea, said admitting that a discussion of the matter was actionable, rather “tied the hands” of the committee for which reason the vetting must be postponed until the courts decided. “Our hands are tied. He owes it to his own conscience to by the outcome of what the court will pronounce. How can we pursue this vetting of this honourable man if a stigma of such size is also hanging around him?” he asked rather rhetorically. The MP also asked the chairman of the committee, Doe Adjaho to write to the Chief Justice, Mrs Georgina Wood, to expedite the decision of the court on the issue. The 2004 report by the Auditor General accused the former minister of causing a colossal of 15 billion old cedis though his involvement with the NVTI loan and another accusation of “fraudulently” releasing “amounts in excess of 19 billion old cedis from the Consolidated Fund.” The vetting process had to proceed on the instruction of the chairman but without Minority members of the committee. Listen to excerpts of the argument at the Speaker's Chamber Story by Fiifi Koomson