Ghana's Undemocratic Parliamentary System: A Proposal For Reforms

'Democracy is a form of government in which all eligible citizens participate equally- either directly or indirectly through elected representatives. It encompasses social, religious, cultural, ethnic, and racial equality, justice, and liberty [Culled from Wikipedia]. '

After decades of indiscriminate military interventions that hampered Ghana's socio-economic development, the country finally returned to constitutional government, which culminated into the Fourth Republic in 1992. Ghana's democracy, however young, is a shining star and a model of democracy in Africa, which every Ghanaian should be proud of and ready to defend selflessly.

I am, however, of the view that, for the advancement and consolidation of the country's infant democracy, there is the need to continuously reform and redesign the country's democratic system in a manner that guarantees the practice of TRUE democracy, in an equitable fashion.

An important arm of Ghana's democratic governance is its legislature (parliament). The functions of Ghana's parliament include law-making and controlling the public purse. Notably, parliament oversees the approval of loans that the country burdens its posterity with. Unfortunately, despite parliament's role in the country's democratic dispensation, voting in Ghana's parliament is unreflective of the country's population distributions, which is attributable to the uneven sizes of electoral constituencies in Ghana.

For explanatory purposes, the 2012 registered voters of electoral constituencies published by the Electoral Commission of Ghana are employed as proxies to the population sizes of electoral constituencies, due to the unavailability of information regarding population sizes of electoral constituencies.

To be specific, Ketu South constituency, for instance, contains the most number of registered voters of 126,659, whereas SekyereAfram Plains constituency comprises the fewest number of registered voters of 12,082. Meanwhile, both electoral constituencies are each represented by ONE parliamentarian.

This implies that in Ghana's parliament, the voice of 12,082 people in SekyereAfram Plains is equivalent to that of 126,659 people in Ketu South. In essence, whenever there is voting in Ghana's parliament and the representative from SekyereAfram Plains shouts 'yeeye' (i.e., votes), the individual voices of the people of SekyereAfram Plains is about 10 times louder than those of their counterparts in Ketu South.

Based on the currentlyuneven sizes of electoral constituencies in Ghana, parliamentary votes in smaller constituencies are considerably weightier in the decision making process of the country compared to those of larger constituencies, which defies the fundamental tenets of democracy: the rule of the majority!

It also turns out that these large constituencies are mostly found in urban areas. In my estimation, the chunk of the educated population of the country resides in these urban localities. Even though literacy is irrelevant in a democracy, it is worth noting that the selection of parliamentarians in Ghana is disproportionally controlled by the largely illiterate and ill-informed voting population in rural areas.

This problem stems from uneven population distributions, which causes electoral constituencies in sparsely populated regions to contain fewer people compared to the sizes of constituencies in densely populated urban regions.

That notwithstanding, it is imperative to recognize that democracy is about the rule of the population and NOT landmass. Consequently, there is the need to address this problem to ensure that the vote of every Ghanaian, regardless of ethnicity or geographical location, has approximately equal weight in the governance of the country.

Rectifying this democratic anomaly is also particularly crucial given the deeply partisan nature of parliamentary voting in Ghana, where the political party with the majority of parliamentarians invariably has its way, while the minority party watches helplessly. In addition, the 1992 Constitution of the country also stipulates that at least 50% of ministerial appointees are appointed from parliament.

The importance of parliamentarians in the governance of the country cannot be overemphasized; as a consequence, the creation of electoral constituencies, which somehow determines who is elected to parliament, should NOT be arbitrarily done.

Ghana doesn't have to reinvent the wheel in an attempt to address this democratic aberration. Legend has it that the United States (US), the oldest democracy and, of course, the model of democracy in the world, identified and resolved this particular problem in the 1700s.

To ensure that the voice of every American is equally represented in Congress, as required in a democracy, the concept of congressional districts was conceived. By contrast, it is important to emphasize that the equivalence of congressional districts in the US is the electoral constituencies in Ghana. While Ghanaians elect a parliamentarian to represent each electoral constituency in its parliament, Americans, on the other hand, elect a representative for each of its congressional districts to represent them in congress.

Unlike the electoral constituencies in Ghana that are arbitrarily created without any scientific basis, congressional districts in the US are created based on population distributions. There are a total of 435 congressional districts in the US with each representing approximately 700,000 people. There is state-by-state redrawing of these congressional districts after population census in every ten years, which guarantees that the sizes of congressional districts are up-to-date with the country's population dynamics.

This is an attestation to the fact that landmass has no bearing on the decision making process in a democratic system, but rather, the size of a region's population determines its political clout. For instance, California is the most populous state in the US whereas Montana is one of the least populated states. In terms of landmass, the state of California is 423,970 km2, which is slightly larger than Montana's 381,154 km2.

By virtue of the respective population sizes of the two states, however, the state of California is represented by a whopping 53 congressional members whereas Montana has only ONE representative.

Furthermore, in the context of presidential elections in the US, Electoral College votes are assigned to states in proportion to the state's population. Once again, while the state of California is allocated 55 Electoral College votes, the state of Montana is assigned only 3 Electoral College votes.

It is apparently clear from the foregoing that, for a country to exercise true democracy, its democratic system must be designed based SOLELY on its population distributions.

For the advancement and consolidation of democracy in Ghana, it is critical that the country practices democracy in its parliament house. To accomplish this goal, the country can design a parliamentary system similar to the American system, but specific to the nation's needs and challenges, to assure that the voice of every Ghanaian is equally trumpeted in parliament.

Toward this end, I propose a framework to guide the redrawing of Ghana's electoral constituencies according to population distributions, with complete disregard to ethnicity or the size of landmass of a region.

First, I suggest the apportioning of the total 275 parliamentary seats to the ten regions of the country in proportion to the region's total population. Table 1 provides a summary of regional allocation of electoral constituencies based on population distributions, compared to the existing regional constituency assignments. It should be noted that data presented here are based on the 2010Population and Housing Census published by the Ghana Statistical Service in May, 2012.

Table 1: Proposed and current assignments of electoral constituencies on regional basis.

No. Region Total Population Proposed No. of Elec. Cons. Current No. of Elec. Cons.Diff.

1 WESTERN 2,376,021 26 26 0

2 CENTRAL 2,201,863 25 23 -2

3 GREATER ACCRA 4,010,054 45 34 -11

4 VOLTA 2,118,252 24 26 2

5 EASTERN 2,633,154 29 33 4

6 ASHANTI 4,780,380 53 47 -6

7 BRONG-AHAFO 2,310,983 26 29 3

8 NORTHERN 2,479,461 28 31 3

9 UPPER EAST 1,046,545 12 15 3

10 UPPER WEST 702,110 8 11 3

TOTAL 24,658,823 275 275

The 'difference' column depicts the difference between the current number of electoral constituencies assigned to a region and its associated proposed number of constituencies. A negative polarity indicates a region that is currently under-represented in parliament whereas a positive difference signifies an over-represented region.

These results reveal that while the Western region has its fair share of parliamentarians, the Greater Accra region is severely under-represented by as many as 11 parliamentarians, followed by Ashanti and Central regions with shortfalls of 6 and 2 parliamentarians, respectively. The Eastern region is over-represented by 4 parliamentarians, while the Brong-Ahafo, Northern, Upper West, and Upper East regions are each over-represented by 3 parliamentarians. Volta region is also over-represented by 2 parliamentarians.

The second phase following the assignment of the total parliamentary seats to the regions is the region-by-region redrawing of electoral constituencies to apportion the region's population into its electoral constituencies according to the number of parliamentary seats allocated to that region.

Based on the total population of 24,658,823and the 275 parliamentary seats in Ghana, the expected size of an electoral constituency is 89,668 people. However, due to some potential logistical and geographical constraints, it is envisioned that this average constituency size cannot be strictly adhered to. To allow some acceptable level of flexibility in redrawing new electoral constituencies, stakeholders in Ghana's election can brainstorm and agree on a standard deviation to define a range of constituency size for the region-by-region redrawing of constituencies.

For example, a standard deviation of 5,000 will prescribe a minimum constituency size of 84,668 people and a maximum constituency size of 94,668 people. To conform to this, smaller electoral constituencies should be merged while larger ones are split to see to it that the total number of people in each redrawn constituency falls within the defined range of 84,668 - 94,668. Additionally, the redrawing process should result in the total number of electoral constituencies assigned to that region.

As a temporary fix to the current system until the redrawing of new electoral constituencies, an alternative approach that assigns parliamentary voting weights to the votes of parliamentarians can be adopted. In this approach, the smallest electoral constituency (Sekyere Afram Plains) is utilized as a reference constituency size and the vote of the parliamentarian representing Sekyere Afram Plains is assigned a voting weight of one.

The votes of all other parliamentarians are then weighted in proportion to the size of their constituencies, in terms of total registered voters, with respect to that of Sekyere Afram Plains. For example, given the 12,082 size of Sekyere Afram Plains, the votes of parliamentarians representing, for example, Jomoro, Madina, and Sissala East, with respective constituency sizes of 78,913, 105,538, and 30,033 should be assigned parliamentary voting weights of approximately 7, 9, and 2, respectively.

Table 2 (not shown) provides a list of the proposed parliamentary voting weights for all the 275 electoral constituencies in Ghana.The original manuscript contains Table 2, I'm happy to email a copy to a reader upon request.

For the implementation of this alternative weighted voting scheme, every parliamentarian will be provided with a small voting card bearing his/her constituency name and its corresponding voting weight. During voting, a parliamentarian will cast the vote in favor or against a motion with the voting card. At the end of the voting process, the total weights in favor will be compared with those against, and the winning stance declared.

While this alternative voting process seems inconvenient compared to the current voting routine in parliament, the practice of true democracy in Ghana's parliament should, however, supersede the convenience of voting in the house.

Equality underpins the definition of democracy! Building a strong and vibrant democratic system devoid of partiality, which has the tendency to breed discontent of Ghana's democratic system, should be the collective goal of every peace loving Ghanaian.

I hope this proposal will bring to the fore, and jump-start the discussion and subsequent reformation of Ghana's democratic system, with regard to this critical equality aspect of democracy that appears missing in Ghana's democratic system.

LONG LIVE GHANA! LONG LIVE GHANA'S DEMOCRACY!!

Dr. Erasmus Kofi Oware

Assistant Professor

The State University of New York at Buffalo, USA.

[email protected]