Political parties urged to draw up succession plan(Page 17) June 19, 2008

Story: Michael Donkor
THE Deputy Chairman of the Electoral Commission (EC), Mr David Adeenze Kangah, has proposed that political parties should have a chain of succession for candidates to national elections well ahead of election years.
He said that should apply to the situation where party lists were used for proportional representation elections.
Speaking at a public lecture organised by the Ghana Academy of Arts and Sciences in Accra last Tuesday, Mr Kangah said the process of identifying candidates for national elections, as was practised by political parties in Africa as a whole and Ghana in particular, left much to be desired, since it was fraught with rancour.
He said that was because the parties generally did not practise internal democratic principles.
He was speaking on the topic: “Ensuring democratic participation in Africa”.
Mr Kangah cited the situation in an African country where primaries were conducted at the constituency level and a candidate identified but at the end of it all the party at the national level replaced the name of the candidate with that of another person chosen by the national executive to be gazetted and he took the seat.
He called for African countries to institute electronic and Internet voting schemes in the future.
He said it was estimated that the initial cost of Internet voting could be 10 times as high as that of community voting but expressed the hope that the cost would come down with the expansion of Internet facilities and improvement in mobile communications.
He explained that in Ghana political parties participated in balloting to determine the position of their candidates on the ballot paper and said in the future a more credible method should be adopted for that purpose, as the present method lent itself to luck.
He said when all candidates had unique serial national ID numbers, those numbers could be used to arrange the candidates on the ballot paper.
Mr Kangah stressed the need for open-air and under-tree polling stations to be replaced with well-constructed polling tents.
He called on all, particularly educated individuals such university lecturers, to participate in the electoral process as polling agents for the candidates they supported, be vigilant and act to defend the integrity of the poll.
Mr Kangah noted that delays in the release of resources or their inadequacy for electoral activities had tended to make election management bodies act in very uncertain ways.
He expressed the hope that budgets for elections would, in the future, be finalised at least one year to the start of preparatory activities for elections and the release of funds for the activities would be effected at least a month to the effective date of the activity.
A lecturer at the Department of Political Science, University of Ghana, Dr Maame Adwoa Gyekye-Jandoh, called for the revamping of the electoral process in many African countries.
She said the electoral environment itself should be open and peaceful to allow free campaigning by competing parties, with sharp crackdowns on political opposition and state-sponsored limitations on the competitive process becoming things of the past.
Dr Gyekye-Jandoh said election management bodies should be independent of the governments of the day and should be seen to be neutral, objective and effective.
She said the judiciary in African countries needed to be professional and independent of the executive arms and they should also be strengthened in their capacity to enforce the rule of law.
She called for the creation of separate election courts to tackle election malpractice and disputes promptly, while special funds should be reserved for post-election disputes.
The Immediate Past President of the Ghana Academy of Arts and Sciences, Nana S.K.B. Asante, said if the 1951 election held in the Gold Coast could be replicated across Africa or the world, the world would be in good shape.
He said that election was conducted by the colonial masters and Dr Kwame Nkrumah, who had been incarcerated, won it.
Nana Asante said the colonial masters followed the logic of the election by releasing Dr Nkrumah to form a government, while the losing party accepted the results gracefully, without crying foul.