Whereas GGDP wants the recommendations by the Constitutional Review Committee (CRC) in relation to the election of MMDCEs to be fully implemented now, IMANI Ghana disagrees.

The think tanks each made their case in a debate organized by the Growth and Development Platform with support from Citi FM on the election of MMDCEs and the abolition of the death penalty in Accra on Tuesday.

[contextly_sidebar id=”1nnHGHb8FqlTnIks4NXhBK6DFvbikFjf”]The CRC Commission was established in January 2010 and released its report on December 2011 which among other things recommended that Metropolitan Chief Executives should be elected while that of a process devised for the appointment of Municipal and District Chief Executives.

Subsequently, government in 2012 released its white paper on the report; however, four years down the line, the implementation is yet to be done.

IMANI Ghana, which was represented at the debate by its Vice President, Kofi Bentil explained that election of MMDCEs would be an exercise in futility if certain issues like devolution of the president’s power and competence of persons appointed to such positions are not tested.

Mr. Bentil also insisted that the death penalty must be maintained.

But the Interim Chairman of GGDP, Kwamena Essilfie Adjaye at the debate said too much resources have been invested in the CRC for its report to be ignored.

“We feel that the constitutional review process, one in which we have invested so much as a nation, time, money and effort, one which began after many years of agitation for constitution review should be completed.”

On election of the MMDCEs, Mr. Adjaye argued that it was very necessary and would complete the decentralization process.

“For many of us, we feel that if we want to be a democracy, if we mean what we want to walk the talk as a democracy, then decentralization must be completed. It must be carried all the way to the point of electing local chief executives. What we have is anachronistic, to have decentralization up to a certain level and at the local level to have appointments and assembly election of chief executive is anachronistic. The most important of all is that democracy cannot be fully implemented until we have popular election of local leaders.”

“In many of the electoral areas, the areas are coterminous with constituencies, if they are coterminous with constituencies them member of parliament are elected popularly in those constituencies, now tell me if the local people can elect their members of parliament in the same area, why on earth can’t they elect their local chief executives? It’s long overdue for Ghana to completely have popular election of all local executives,” he added.

Mr, Adjaye further charged political parties and civil society organizations to do their part to ensure that the CRC report was fully implemented.

“We want the political parties to take this up, we want CSOs to join us in making sure that this process is completed. We have gone even further, we concentrated on two major issues, on decentralization, more specifically on the election of MMDCEs and we looked at the abolition of the death penalty in our paper.”

For his part, IMANI’s Kofi Bentil said though they are not against election of MMDCEs, he said some issues affecting the systems would still persist if the nation adopted the voting system for the MMDCEs.

He also argued that there was the need for persons taking up such position to go through what he described as “competence testing” processes.

Below are some arguments Kofi Bentil put forth at the debate:

“… In as much as we have our view that this must happen, we think that there are real impediments in the way of people who have the opportunity to implement these things and for which reason they don’t implement them and what we need to do is to try and deal with those impediments. So what do we do when we’ve given an executive president all the power in this country and then we tie his hands such that he cannot be effective at the local level? If we can deal with that then maybe we would be solving the problem.”

Devolution of power

“Essentially, electing DCEs and co are another way of effecting devolution of power. If you therefore want to devolve power, then it must be started from the top. The president has too much power…it therefore does not help anybody if you keep the president having all that power and you still have that devolution in name at the local level. We want that to happen, but we think there are structural issues that fight against it.”

Quality of human resources

“We have a real difficult and serious problem with the quality of our human resource…Some of the people who are running things at our local level are atrocious.  Some of the people at the local level when the get the position of the MMDCEs do not have an intention to be effective in changing the lives of the people down there, their intention is to be building houses in Accra and be changing their own circumstances. So they instead solve personal problems and engage in booty and freebie sharing. If we go forward and therefore start doing these things without addressing some of these concerns, we will end up handing a lot of our national resources to people who have no clue to what they are doing. So we need to address that matter. Must there not be some sort of competence testing before we enter a simple clear election?”

Democracy not universal adult suffrage

“Democracy is not the same as universal adult suffrage. That is the situation where anybody of a certain age should vote. We have a situation where our democracy has been equated to universal adult suffrage so everybody has one vote and to that extent therefore, it is the popular person who would win and not necessarily the competent person. And at the local level, the village drunkard can win. If we create a system that can elect the village drunkard and entrust him with resources then we are not doing a good job in fashioning and crafting our democracy in a way that fits.

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By: Godwin A. Allotey/citifmonline.com/Ghana
Follow @AlloteyGodwin

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