The Committee wants to give the President an extra year. This column will argue, plainly and firmly, that we should refuse. Four years is not broken. The column drops this week.

Let me be straight with you up front. I agree with most of what the CRC proposes for the Presidency. And I disagree, firmly, with one thing. That single disagreement is what this week's column is about.

On the good side: a Cabinet capped at 57 Ministers (down from the 80-plus we have grown accustomed to), a ban on sitting MPs serving as Ministers, a taxable presidential salary, and a reformed appointments regime that strips the President of unilateral discretion over the Chief Justice, the Electoral Commissioner, the Auditor-General and the heads of the independent bodies. Every one of these deserves broad public support.

But then, in the same chapter, the Committee proposes to lengthen the presidential term from four years to five. That we must refuse. Why? Because four years is not broken. It is a global democratic norm: Washington, Brasília, Nairobi and Monrovia, among many others, operate on four-year cycles. There is no credible evidence anywhere that longer terms deliver better development outcomes. What they reliably deliver is the opposite: delayed reform, complacency in the middle years, and a wider window in which mistakes compound before voters can respond.

Do the arithmetic. Under a five-year term with the same two-term ceiling, we would be locked into ten years of a failing administration rather than eight. That is a 25 per cent expansion of the risk each generation of Ghanaians has to carry.

Ask anyone who lived through the last two years of a government they had grown weary of what another year of the same would have felt like. Then ask yourself why we would volunteer for that possibility.

If the Committee's real concern is that four years is not long enough to deliver, the honest answer is not a longer calendar. It is a professional transition regime, civil service continuity, a binding National Development Plan, and disciplined fiscal rules. Build the institutions that make four years sufficient. Do not rewrite the Constitution to accommodate their absence.

The full argument, with the reforms in this chapter that deserve our support, lands on Tuesday, 22nd September.

Reject the extension. Defend the four-year term.