“We are on slippery slopes, we travel with caution”

Policy of Friday, May 8, 2020

Source: www.ghanaweb.com

2020-05-08

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With the December 2020 general election around the corner, a prominent member of the new ruling patriotic party, Kyeremateng Agyarko has called on his party to act cautiously as it prepares to hold internal elections to nominate parliamentary candidates.

According to the former Minister of Energy, the party should be guided by the lessons of the past, as there have been several incidents of internal friction emanating from that exercise.

Read his full writing below

Every four years or so, the New Patriotic Party (NPP) and, to a lesser extent, the other parties launch into an orgy of turbulence focused on competition for office within the political space. This whirlwind of disputed personal and personal interests has always threatened party cohesion and affected performance in every impending general election. The election of polling station executives sometimes turns out to be a dubious exercise in selecting people to act in that capacity. The election of the constituency, regional and national officials on each occasion throws unpleasant antics with all its dangerous positions.

However, it is the selection or election of parliamentary candidates that represents the greatest danger to the political order. In some places, the answer becomes so poisonous that you can conclude that there will be no life after the contest.

Now, I’m not here to criticize competition as a bad thing in itself. In fact, healthy competition provides those who have the rights and authority to make a decision or decision, the information and attributes necessary about each competitor to make the right decision or the option they consider most appropriate for them. Without competition or the competitive process, which separates wheat from chaff, we end up with impositions that are often discouraged or misplaced.

The July 1965 election illustrates this absurdity of the non-competitive election.

In May 1965, the Minister of Justice, Mr. K.O. Ofori-Atta introduced the electoral provisions bill in parliament, which describes the electoral provision of the electoral procedures that regulate the Constitution. In effect, the bill sought to implement the new one-party state dispensation. The confused thinking that permeated the bill grew out of the creation of a single all-encompassing national party on the one hand, and the idea of ​​popular representation on the other.

The first provision of the bill sought to restrict candidates for the future presidential election of a president should the election be contested.

In its unamended form, Article 11 gave members of parliament the right to determine a contested presidential election by secret ballot.

However, the new bill provided for only one candidate to stand for a presidential election. Hon. Kofi Baako, in a debate on the floor of the Chamber on May 18, 1965, gave the following interpretation to the bill. “The person who is going to be president will be chosen by the national party. Then there will be only one person, and it will not be disputed. ” In short, the Peoples’ Convention Party (PCP) had no intention of allowing even rival presidential candidates within the party to compete, let alone the independents.

At the level of the parliamentary elections, the situation, except for some embarrassing gaps, was repeated.
The CPP Central Committee selected all the candidates, without allowing others to stand up. All were declared to be returned without opposition, even without the formality of a vote.

The strange aspect of this process was that it allowed the Central Committee to assign people who became automatic parliamentarians to any constituency that so chooses. So, for example, Kwesi Ghapson, professor at the Kwame Nkrumah Institute of Ideology in Winneba and a man from the Central Region was assigned to become a deputy for Abuakwa in the Eastern Region. He did not come from Abuakwa. It did not come from Abuakwa. He was not a resident of Abuakwa. He had no connection to Abuakwa, yet he had been selected, without the remotest consent of the Abuakwa people, to become his representative. So how could he have represented a people with whom he was not connected and a land that was “alien” to him? If the people of Abuakwa were not happy with their performance as their MP, what should they do? Under this “forced” representation, the only contribution he made on the floor of the Chamber, as the Honorable Member said on behalf of Abuakwa, is said to be “when Osagyefo is speaking, everyone is saying ‘yes’, ‘yes’. Are they sincere “I, Kwesi Ghapson, a member of Kibi, am not sincere. All of us are not sincere because we say yes, even when we want to say no.” The importance of the above is that the CPP created a system and an environment that created “yes men” and hypocrites who knew how to spread bread with butter.

The point is that we have already walked this path before and the result for the CCP and the nation was an unmitigated disaster. We as NPP have also traveled this path in 2008, as a result of which, 18 deeply dissatisfied candidates who had been disqualified were contested as independent candidates. Although it is true that only one of them, Hon. Joe Osei-Owusu, now an honorable member of Bekwai and First Vice President of Parliament, won his seat as an independent candidate, the noise, discontent and dismay he caused in the party affected our votes in Ashanti. Is this an experience that we want to repeat in 2020? I doubt it. I seriously doubt it.

I believe in the common sense of our members that, according to the constitution of our party, they are constituted in our internal electoral college. Given the unlimited opportunity, they will act in our own enlightened interest and elect candidates who they believe will serve our interests.

They may, like all human institutions and arrangements, not do well all the time, but that is in the nature of choice.

Nor am I arguing that a negotiated result is bad and does not produce good results. The key word is “negotiated”. It is up to party leaders to convince voters that, given certain local factors, variables, and dynamics, a negotiated outcome in a particular location or instance may produce a better outcome than a competitive process. We have been there again before.

The prelude to the 1969 general election saw many of these results negotiated under the leadership of Professor Kofi Abrefa Busia. These negotiations led to people like J H Mensah, T.K. Aboagye and R.R. Amponsah emerging as a parliamentary candidate. My own late father, Kwasi Agyarko, gave up his interest in Manhyia for the young Dr. Kwame Safo-Adu. There was an even more interesting case in the Kwabre constituency. The primaries were held with the following ordinal result; Mr. Yeboah, Kwame Boakye, Akenten Appiah-Menkah and Alhaji Osei. Mr. Yeboah died before the general election. One would have expected Kwame Boakye to stand as a candidate. However, he was a very young man who had just come out of school and the party leaders called on him to stop for a better time, when he would have been prepared enough to take his place. Akenten Appiah-Menkah, who ranked third in the primaries, was called to fill the vacancy that had created the death of Mr. Yeboah.

What bothers people is the emerging authoritarian streak that suggests to our people on the ground that we can step over them and do whatever we want. No sir! These are the children and descendants of a tradition of struggle, but they are also very susceptible to reason. We gain absolutely nothing from an authoritarian stance. If we can’t negotiate an outcome, let the competition decide and the best candidate wins.

The key element leading to a successful outcome in the negotiations is the belief of all parties that it is being done in good faith and for the collective good, and not in the limited interest of private individuals or vested interests. We as a group cannot continue to work on this slippery slope. So in the future, we must do things very differently.

Here are some suggestions;

First, we must introduce online form filling to eliminate this rat race from some alleged powers that are not given to you as to who gets a form. It is not within your province to determine. Getting a form does not automatically make you a candidate. It is simply an expression of interest. There are subsequent processes established by constitutional mandate to determine who becomes a candidate. We cannot, by any means or by the extension of our imagination, take away the legitimate authority to determine who becomes a candidate for our delegates.

Second, we must infuse the research process with substance and consistency across the board. The party should ask standard questions that all potential candidates must face, in addition to follow-up questions and other discretionary questions that should aim to establish the good faith and qualitative substance of the applicants. Then there is the legitimate question of an applicant’s contribution to the constituency in the past 2 years. For starters, I think there should be a list of qualified contributions and that it can count towards an applicant’s contribution to nurture the electorate and this should not be defined only in terms of cash. There are many party people who dedicate themselves and dedicate their time to the service of our party at the constituency, regional and national levels. All this must count for something. How about extending the 2 years to 5 or 10 years to get longer-term commitments to the party and eliminate the prospects of spending the night that may see the 2 years bearable enough to bet on? It is also necessary to work on the quality of the verification panels.

Third, what kind of attributes and standards do we want to see in our parliamentarians as representatives of our party. What we should consider doing is qualify potential applicants and stakeholders nationally first, before they are even allowed to drop to the constituency level. We can apply a rigorous but standardized criterion to qualify people in search of the political quality and commitment that we seek in our parliamentarians. After making the list of national candidates, they are free to seek commercialization at the constituency level.

Fourth, there is wisdom and merit in offering safeguards to our serving parliamentarians. This cannot be done the current way, where we introduce twisted rules and rule interpretation at the last minute and hope to get confused or demolished. We are better than that. Here are some options that we could consider. We could set up a rule that says our first-time MP’s seat is off-limits and not open to competition, unless that MP has done something very unpleasant that most of us miss out on and want us to remove. We could put that rule in now with a sunrise date of 2028. Such a sunrise clause will give people enough time to adjust their plans and expectations. We could also put a second rule that says that the seat for the deputies in office who register an increase in the party’s presidential vote in the previous elections by a minimum of 5% are also not open to competition. This could provide a significant boost to overall efforts to win elections. This will provide a powerful incentive for deputies to sit down to maximize presidential votes, which is what counts in forming a government. This could also have a sunrise clause that is activated, for example, in 2028 to give people enough time to adjust their expectations on how the facts speak to them on the ground.

One thing that has become apparent in the last primary round is that things don’t work the way we imagine, either because of internal inconsistencies in our rules and regulations or because the system is open to too much manipulation. Whatever it is, we can’t continue on these slippery slopes.

Long live the Danquah- Busia- Dombo tradition

Long live the new patriotic party

Long live Ghana