District Level Elections Must Be Party Based

Partisan elections at the district assembly and unit committee level, in which parties would be free to put forward and support candidates, was the general consensus gleaned from the round-table discussion group held earlier this week in Accra, organized by KAB Governance Consulting (KGC), a consulting group that has been involved in the district elections since they were first introduced in 1988/9.

It was suggested party involvement may combat voter apathy, and the electorate would be better able to identify with assembly candidates if they were affiliated to a particular party.

Chairman of the Electoral Commission, Dr. Kwadwo Afari-Gyan, cited a possible advantage of the involvement of political parties as the opportunity for "parties to test their popularity two years ahead of the general elections."

However this, he continued, "presumably would be at the expense of the common platforms, which in principle seek to foster open debate by candidates" and thereby afford the electorate the opportunity to "assess at first hand the comparative merit of the contestants on an individual basis."

Dr. Afari-Gyan also added that whilst some have been quick to attribute low turnout at the district assembly and unit committee elections to the lack of party participation, it is important to remember that lower turnout in local elections appears to be a world-wide phenomenon.

There is also the issue of funding if political parties are to become involved in district assembly and unit committee elections. With the absence of public funding of political parties, the possibility that political party involvement will induce higher voter turnouts in the district level elections has to be carefully weighed against how much it will cost the parties to effectively compete.

It is estimated that a candidate in the district assembly elections would need a minimum of one million cedis to campaign effectively, translating to a cost of about five billion cedis for a party to support candidates in all of the 5,000 or so electoral areas.

In light of this Dr. Afari-Gyan advised political parties to "soberly reflect" on where the huge amounts of money they will need for their effective participation in the district elections would come from.

Mr. Kwasi Ameyaw-Cheremeh, General Secretary of the National Association of Local Authorities of Ghana, argued that Ghana was 'deceiving itself' if it believed that parties were not involved in the electoral process already, saying it was "impossible to run away from the fact that all elections are partisan."

Constricting party involvement, Ameyaw-Cheremah said, not only directly attributes to low voter turnout but suggests politics is 'dirty' and partisan involvement would not foster development, which he felt was simply not the case.

With the issue of political party involvement in the district assembly and unit committee elections clearly at the forefront of most of the participant's minds, it was suggested it would be premature to look at the legal and institutional framework in too greater depth until this issue had been resolved.

Instead a forum of debate, organized the government, was suggested, to discuss what was envisaged for local government and to formulate a coherent policy accordingly.

If it were deemed that district assembly and unit committee elections would be better served by political party involvement, Dr. Afari-Gyan called for the change to be initiated alongside the introduction of public funding of political parties, thus ensuring most parties are not 'killed off' due to lack of funds for effective competition and a level playing field in the local elections exists.