Members of Parliament are likely to be recalled to the House for an emergency meeting to reconsider and ratify a 2015 Ghana-US Military agreement signed by former Foreign Affairs Minister Hannah Tetteh.

Information Minister Mustapha Hamid said the government needs to give “proper legal authority” to the 2015 agreement which forms the foundation of a similar agreement signed with the US in 2018.

The 2018 agreement has been ratified by Parliament amidst drama and chaos with the Minority National Democratic Congress walking out of Parliament.

The Minority insists it will not have anything to do with an agreement that is likely to sell the sovereignty of the country.

But government spokespersons have said the 2018 agreement is not significantly different from the 2015 one signed by the NDC, except that the John Mahama led government failed to bring it to Parliament for ratification as required by law.

Mustapha Hamid told Joy FM’s Evans Mensah on Top Story, Monday, in order to avert a possible suit that may torpedo the current agreement with the US, the government had to send the 2015 agreement to Parliament for ratification.

In the absence of the ratification of the 2015 agreement, “somebody can go to the Supreme Court for a declaration that the agreement is null and void,” he said.

Mustapha Hamid

He explained that the “2015 agreement guides our military cooperation activities. All the things we are doing currently are guided by the 1998 and 2015 agreement. We need to give proper legal authority to what is before Parliament.”

Even though the House is on recess, the Information Minister said it will not be out of place to recall the MPs to Parliament to have them approve and ratify the 2015 agreement.

He said given that the 2015 agreement with the US was signed by the NDC government, it should not be a problem for the Minority MPs to approve and ratify same when they are recalled to Parliament.

Mustapha Hamid said “they know this was not a dangerous agreement; they know it was nothing dangerous to our security but in opposition politics, you ought to do things to score political points.”

“We cannot build Berlin walls around our country and be isolated,” he said, hoping, the Minority members will support and approve the 2015 agreement when they are recalled.

But if the comments by the Minority Chief Whip Muntaka Mubarak are anything to go by, the Minority will boycott the 2015 agreement, the same way they did to the 2018 agreement.

Mubarak told Evans Mensah they will not want to have anything to do with the two agreements.

He also dismissed claims that the Minority members who were in the majority at the committee level approved the agreement at the Committee level only to boycott it at the plenary.

Defence Minister Dominic Nitiwul alleged there were 14 Minority MPs as against 10 Majority MPs on the day the agreement was approved by majority decision at the committee level.

He said the committee members had every opportunity to throw out the agreement with a vote if they were truly against the agreement.

He was however surprised that the same people walked out of Parliament when the same agreement they approved at the committee level was brought to the plenary.

But Muntaka Mubarak insists the chairman of the Defence Committee resisted all attempt for votes at the committee level.

He said tried as the Minority members did, the chair of the committee “refused to call for division” in order for the votes to be done.