A former two-term president cannot run as vice president – Kwaku Azar explains

A legal scholar Prof Stephen Kwaku Asare, popularly known as Kwaku Azar, has argued that a person who has served two terms as president cannot lawfully contest as a vice-presidential candidate under Ghana’s 1992 Constitution.

In a Facebook post on January 7, 2026, Kwaku Azar said the question was posed by his cousin, who asked whether the constitution expressly bars a former two-term president from being elected on a vice-presidential ticket.

According to him, while there is no single constitutional provision that explicitly states such a prohibition, the answer remains a clear no when the constitution is read purposively, rather than mechanically.

Kwaku Azar explained that the constitution requires the president and vice president to be elected on a single ticket, meaning voters are not only choosing a president but also a potential successor.

Ghana does not need longer presidential terms - Kwaku Azar

He pointed to Article 60, which provides that in the event of the president’s death, resignation, or removal from office, the vice president automatically assumes the presidency without a new election, discretion, or confirmation.

“This makes the vice president a president-in-waiting, not an ordinary deputy,” he argued.

He further linked this to the presidential term-limit rule under Article 66, which bars a person from serving more than two terms as president.

He noted that the purpose of this provision is to prevent entrenchment of power and ensure leadership rotation, not to create technical loopholes.

Kwaku Azar referenced Article 60(7), which states that if a vice president assumes the presidency and serves more than half of a term, that period counts as a full term for the purposes of term limits.

This, he said, shows that the constitution treats succession as genuine presidential service rather than a legal technicality.

'Supreme Court acted to protect the constitution, not any politician' – Kwaku Azar

“Once this is accepted, the logic is unavoidable. You cannot bar someone from being president yet allow them to be elected to an office that automatically makes them president under foreseeable conditions,” he stated.

He warned that permitting a former two-term president to contest as vice president would effectively place that individual back on the presidential ballot, enable nationwide campaigning, and open a ‘back door’ to the presidency through death, resignation, or removal of the sitting president.

Such an outcome, he argued, would undermine the very purpose of presidential term limits.

Kwaku Azar added that Ghana’s courts, which routinely apply a purposive approach to constitutional interpretation, do not allow the constitution to be circumvented indirectly when it cannot be violated directly.

While acknowledging the importance of textualism in constitutional interpretation, he cautioned against using it to justify what he described as constitutional absurdities.

“Textualism is not an excuse for constitutional absurdity,” he said, stressing that where a literal reading defeats the clear purpose of a provision or creates loopholes the framers sought to prevent, courts must look beyond the bare text to the constitution’s meaning and design.

He stressed that term limits are meant to safeguard against entrenchment of power, not to be treated as drafting puzzles, adding that the constitution must be read as a coherent whole rather than a collection of technical escape hatches.

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Meanwhile, watch as NDC MPs and party leadership pay tribute to late Naser Toure Mahama