Hung parliament bad for Ghana, it will affect multinational agreements – Joe Jackson

A financial analyst, Joe Jackson has said Ghana does not need a hung parliament, a parliament in which no political party has enough seats to secure an overall majority.

Otherwise, he said, it will have dire repercussions on multinational contractual agreements that the government will need the legislature to approve.

He explained that there is going to be extreme partisanship associated with debates on such contracts with the opposition party most likely rejecting all the deals in an attempt to create problems for the government and make it unpopular.

The Chief Operations Officer of Dalex Finance added that these contracts may not be bad for the country but given the polarized nature of the country and the extreme partisanship with which things are looked at in Ghana, those deals are likely to be thrown out of the window.

Barring any litigation which could alter the parliamentary results of the just-ended elections, Ghana is going to have, for the first time, a hung parliament.

At the moment, the governing New Patriotic Party (NPP) and the main opposition National Democratic Congress (NDC) each control 237 seats in parliament. There is one independent Member of Parliament.

Mr. Jackson said this is not what Ghana needs.

“We have got to take some hard decisions. We have got to call these companies and sit at the table to renegotiate."

“This can be partisan, we have got to take hard decisions about how to balance infrastructure and consumption, we are going to take hard decisions about how to put up stimulus to deal with Covid-19 effect, we got to take hard decisions about our debt and where we are going. Truly a hung parliament may not be what we need,” said.