Selecting appointees from one party 'parochial' – Dr Aggrey-Darko

Dr Evans Aggrey-Darko, a political science lecturer at the University of Ghana, is calling for a new paradigm that shies away from the practice where persons nominated to serve in government are exclusively drawn from a membership pool of the governing party.

He described such practice as “parochial” and a “narrow” way of governing the country.

His call follows suggestions by Deputy General Secretary of the main opposition National Democratic Congress (NDC), Koku Anyidoho, that party members who refuse to go through the NDC’s ideological school cannot be president or hold any position in a future NDC government.

This, according to Dr Aggrey-Darko, smacks of good governance in the face as it has the tendency to fester the winner takes it all system.

Speaking to Class news, he said: “A government of Ghana is a government of Ghana. The NDC, if they win, is not the government of NDC. If a government wins it’s not a government of NPP, it’s the government of the people of Ghana and therefore the critical thing is that if you want to spread your tentacles, you want to cast the net wide so that you are able to recruit the human resources that you need to be able to govern the people around certain developmental targets that you’ve set yourself out to accomplish. Call it a contract with Ghana".

"What we have done over the past 60 years is why we are still in the woods. It is too parochial, it is narrow for one to suggest that once we have won then the booty must be shared among ourselves.”