By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.
This is the last time that I shall be taking up the irritating but seemingly discursively intractable question of doing away with the so-called winner-takes-all undemocratic culture of Ghana's Fourth Republic. We must quickly point out that our electoral system, as it currently prevails in the country, is only partially democratic. Full-democracy would necessitate that all levels of government administrators, outside the career-oriented civil service, are directly elected at the polls by Ghanaian voters.
This will make the present situation, whereby the president directly appoints Metropolitan, Municipal and District Chief Executives a practice of the past. It would also make our local leaders directly answerable to their primary constituents, and not to the relatively remotely located Flagstaff House (See "Beware of Sabotage: Apaak Reminds Campaigners Against Winner Takes All" MyJoyOnline.com 6/14/14).
Before I venture forth any further, it is very significant to point out that even as I write (6/14/14), President Mahama has yet to round up the appointments of Metropolitan, Municipal and District Chief Executives around the country. I am even more concerned about the president's apparent inability to fill all the administrative slots at the district level, particularly in the often overlooked rural areas, nearly two years after he was controversially declared winner of Election 2012.
What this means is that by the end of his current tenure in December 2016, at least half of whatever policy agenda Mr. Mahama had on his plate for these perennially marginalized parts of the country would not have been fulfilled. Couple the foregoing with the current very bleak economic situation in the country, and matters could not begin to be perceived to be even grimmer, to speak much less about the utterly hopeless.
What I sincerely believe to be seriously hampering the movement towards "Absolute Constitutional Democracy," has to do with the wrongful choice of words by those fervidly pushing for this more productive and desirable change, on the one hand, and those in favor of the currently entrenched anti-democracy regime of "Constitutional Dictatorship." For the latter is essentially what presently prevails in the country.
Ghanaians have themselves amply demonstrated the fact of their not being in anyway, whatsoever, in favor of the current political regime whereby District Chief Executives are directly appointed by the President and peremptorily imposed on them from the Flagstaff House. And they have registered their displeasure by roundly condemning and flatly rejecting the overwhelming bulk of such appointees.
In the process, Mr. Mahama has had to reluctantly rescind a remarkable number of these appointments, and has had to prevail on some regional ministers to double their workload, by pinch-hitting as Interim District Chief Executives until such time as Mr. Mahama could get around to appointing either new compromise local administrators or acquiesce to the demands of constituents by recommending locally acceptable ones.
Such inordinately centralized approach to governance leaves little room or time for the president to focus more on the economic development of the country. As of this writing, Mr. Mahama was reported to be still going about the process of appointing and posting Ghanaian diplomats abroad. The preceding notwithstanding, I also strongly disagree with Dr. Emmanuel Akwete, of the Institute of Democratic Governance (IDEG), that the so-called current political arrangement of winner-takes-all had anything to do with the unduly protracted eight months that it took the Wood Supreme Court to resolve the Election 2012 Presidential Petition launched by Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo, of the main opposition New Patriotic Party (NPP).
The latter situation, it cannot be gainsaid, had more to do with the gross incompetence of the Atuguba-presided Supreme Court panel that adjudicated the case. But even more significantly, ought to be highlighted the fact that merely having Metropolitan, Municipal and District Chief Executives elected by parties other than the president's own does not, in any way, imply that these non-NDC local administrators will be hell-bent on making it difficult for Mr. Mahama to govern the country. No such argument could be at once more parochial and absurd. And the likes of Dr. Apaak would do well to study the classical examples of advanced democracies like the United States, Britain, Canada, France, Australia and Germany, among a host of others.
And if an ardent and intransigent Mahama critic like Mr. Kofi Jumah, the New Patriotic Party firebrand and former Kumasi mayor and NPP-MP for Kumasi-Asokwa, were elected District Chief Executive of Asokwa, what prevents President Mahama from even-handedly dealing with Mr. Jumah by releasing the necessary budgetary funding and other statutorily authorized facilities to enable DCE Jumah cater to the communal or public needs of Asokwans?
In other words, all it takes to absolutely and progressively democratize Ghana for rapid socioeconomic and cultural development is common sense. Nothing more or less.
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*Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.
Department of English
Nassau Community College of SUNY
Garden City, New York
Board Member, The Nassau Review
June 14, 2014
E-mail: okoampaahoofe@optimum.net
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