Contemporary Constitutional Issues in our Multiparty Democracy Contemporary Constitutional Issues in our Multiparty Democracy Your Lordship the Chairman, Prof. Justice Dr. S.K. Date-Bah; Your Lordships present; Director and Lecturers of the Ghana School of Law; Invited Guests; My dear students; Ladies and Gentlemen of the Press; Ladies and Gentlemen. I cannot pretend that I am happy to deliver this year ' s Re Akoto Lecture. I am not. I am growing increasingly suspicious of the many institutions which contact me to deliver lectures, often at short notice, provide no research funding to prepare for the lecture, harass me with telephone calls until I agree to deliver the lecture, and reward me with a bottle of coke after the lecture. These institutions are also often not interested in assisting me develop the lecture into a more resolute paper that can be valuable to researchers, consultants and policy makers. My dear friends and students, this attack is primarily not aimed at you. It is aimed more at my friends in the media who call me up sometimes at midnight and at 5:30am to seek free legal advice, counselling, opinions or commentary on some legal issue or other; and they do not even add the customary bottle of coke afterwards. As they may have noticed, I have decided to refrain from such episodic and obscurantist engagements with the media and focus on a more resolute and sustained engagement which I hope will contribute materially to the growth of our young and often ailing democracy. As many of you are aware, I have started an ambitious project of exhaustively analyzing the 1992 Constitution from textual, contextual, historical and comparative constitutional perspectives. This project will cost a lot of money and I will soon be calling on various media houses to start bidding for the right to air the finished product. If the media values the constitutional analytical input to their programmes and to the governance of our country, they should be able to put their money where their interests lie. The second reason why I am not happy is that you are putting me in the same category of heavy weights such as the late Rt. Hon. Peter Ala Adjetey, His Lordship Justice S. A. Brobbey, and His Lordship A.K.P. Kludze who delivered the previous Re Akoto Memorial Lectures. For the avoidance of doubt, I am not in that league of Speakers of Parliament and Supreme Court judges. If you made a mistake in inviting 5