Executive Director of the Ghana Center for Democratic Development (CDD-Ghana), Prof. Henry Kwasi Prempeh, has welcomed the Supreme Court’s decision striking down the delegate system used by
political parties to elect their presidential and parliamentary candidates.
Speaking in an interview on Woezor TV on Sunday, August 2, he said the Supreme Court’s ruling has spared the country the cost of a national referendum that otherwise would have required a constitutional amendment through a referendum.
“At least I am happy that the court has pre-empted it because it saved us some money. To change this, these are entrenched provisions. You have to go to a referendum. The court, by pre-empting this and making that decision, has saved us some money — quite a bit of money actually,” he said.
Prof. Prempeh said CDD-Ghana had long advocated abolishing the delegate system because it undermined internal party democracy and encouraged corruption in political party primaries.
He noted that the organisation’s recommendation to scrap the system predated the legal challenge that culminated in the Supreme Court’s ruling.
“We didn’t do this knowing that there would be a lawsuit. At the time we were doing this, there was no lawsuit,” he said.
According to him, although delegate-based elections are practised in some jurisdictions, CDD concluded that Ghana’s experience showed the system had become detrimental to democratic governance.
He explained that the organisation proposed replacing it with a one-member, one-vote system to strengthen participation and reduce the influence of money in party elections.
“We took the position that, to advance our democracy, we needed to move beyond the delegate system to a one-person, one-vote within the parties,” Prof. Prempeh stated.
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