Parliament’s passage of the Tribunals Bill, 2026, has reopened a wound many Ghanaians thought had healed. The bill, steered through the House by the Attorney-General and Minister for Justice, Dr Dominic Ayine, survived a dramatic Minority walkout and vocal opposition from the Trades Union Congress before clearing its third reading and heading to President John Dramani Mahama for assent. For a country whose institutional memory of “tribunals” is inseparable from the Provisional National Defence Council era, the reaction was predictable: suspicion first, substance second.
But strip away the PNDC ghost, and what remains is a piece of unfinished constitutional business. Articles 126 and 142 of the 1992 Constitution have always made room for Regional and District Tribunals; the framework simply sat dormant for more than three decades while the ordinary courts absorbed everything thrown at them — until the backlog became untenable. The Attorney-General’s own justification leaned on that arithmetic: the regular court system accumulates roughly 3,360 new backlogged cases, a volume no bench can meaningfully clear under present arrangements.
The Clause the Room Walked Out On
The single most contested provision was Clause 4, which permits tribunal panels to seat non-lawyers alongside a legally qualified chairperson. Minority Leader Alexander Afenyo-Markin argued this risked creating a parallel justice system, one where confidence in due process could erode as fast as it was built. The Minority sought the clause’s deletion; the Majority rejected the amendment; the Minority left the chamber rather than vote on a bill it considered structurally compromised.
That objection deserves to be taken seriously, not waved off as political theatre. Non-lawyer adjudication of serious criminal matters is a legitimate due-process concern, and Ghana’s own history gives that concern teeth. Where the debate has gone wrong is in treating Clause 4 as a single, monolithic risk — as though the only thing a mixed panel could ever try is a criminal case with someone’s liberty on the line.
The Argument Nobody in the Chamber Made
Here is the reframe: the same design feature the Minority fears for high-stakes criminal matters is precisely the feature Ghana needs for the offences its formal courts have quietly stopped bothering to prosecute.
Walk through any Ghanaian city or town and the evidence of unprosecuted indiscipline is not subtle. Illegal waste dumping chokes drains ahead of every rainy season. Toll booths are routinely bypassed by commercial and private drivers alike, bleeding revenue that should be funding the very roads being damaged. Informal-sector tax compliance remains an aspiration more than a practice. Indiscriminate defecation in unauthorised places persists in communities that have gone decades without enforced sanitation bylaws. None of this rises to the level of a High Court docket. All of it corrodes the social contract in ways that compound, year after year, precisely because there is no forum built to handle it at volume.
This is not a gap the regular courts were ever designed to fill, and it shows: cases like these simply do not survive triage against homicide trials, land disputes, and commercial litigation. A tribunal structure — local, fast, staffed in part by community and technical assessors sitting beside a legal chair — is close to the ideal instrument for exactly this category of offence. Environmental and sanitation matters are already within the bill’s contemplated scope alongside economic cases, which means the legislative appetite for this application already exists; it simply hasn’t been argued for in public.
Where the Loopholes Actually Live
None of this is an argument for waving the bill through uncritically. The same features that make tribunals efficient make them exploitable if oversight is weak:
- Appointment control. Whoever appoints non-lawyer panelists effectively shapes outcomes without needing to win a legal argument. If appointments track political patronage rather than technical competence, the tribunal becomes a rubber stamp with a community face.
- Oversight capture. The bill’s new Tribunal Oversight Committee is only as independent as the process that populates it. An oversight body drawn from the same political current as the executive that created the tribunals is not oversight; it is delegation.
- Jurisdictional drift. “Economic, environmental and other matters assigned by law” is elastic language. Left unchecked, future subsidiary legislation could quietly expand tribunal reach into politically sensitive terrain — land, mining, protest-adjacent offences — without fresh parliamentary debate.
- Speed without safeguards. The backlog argument is real and sympathetic, but expedited process is also how due process gets shaved down when it becomes inconvenient. Speed and fairness are not naturally aligned; they have to be engineered to coexist.
A Constructive Path, Not a Concession
Ghana does not need to choose between fearing the tribunal and embracing it uncritically. It needs to name its purpose precisely. A civic-discipline tribunal track — ring-fenced by statute to matters of sanitation, environmental degradation, toll and tax evasion, and public-order offences, with clear jurisdictional ceilings that exclude criminal liberty questions — would answer the Minority’s due-process concern and the Attorney-General’s backlog concern in the same stroke.
The same clause the Minority walked out on may be the one that finally gives Ghana’s streets, drains, and toll booths a day in court. A tribunal is only as dangerous — or as useful — as the hands it is placed in. Ghana has thirty years of caution about the former. It is time to legislate deliberately for the latter.
Rexford Adjei Darko is a Public Relations Practitioner, Governance & AI Advocate and CSR Researcher based in Udon Thani, Thailand.
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