Democratic Integrity Cannot Be Trumped by Corrupt Plutocrats

The 5-2 Decision recently handed down by the Supreme Court of Ghana (SCOG) for all legitimately registered and officially recognized political parties in the country to promptly scrap the “plutocratic” and the democratically untenable delegate system of electing Presidential and Parliamentary Candidates quadrennially, as well as byelection candidates, one presumes, could not have come at a more opportune moment (See “Delegates System Ruling: Gary Nimako Cites Financial Burden of Direct Primaries” Ghanaweb.com 7/30/26).

To be certain, this momentous decision, coming 34 protracted years into Ghana’s Fourth-Republican Dispensation, is actually darn too late and flagrantly overdue for West Africa’s most robust and foremost progressive democratic culture. The Delegate System, a subject on which this author has written and published several book-length articles and media columns over at least a decade-and-half, was both democratically and constitutionally egregiously flawed from the very inception of Ghana’s Fourth-Republican Dispensation in January 1992, for the simple and the singular reason that unlike American Democracy, for just only one striking example which is fundamentally and anachronistically predicated on the Delegate System, a fiercely contested terrain in recent years, Ghana’s Constitution dictates a transparent democratic system and culture and protocol of the Popular Vote at all levels of the electoral process, which was precisely what Ghana’s Supreme Court decision of July 29, 2026, authoritatively and historically sought to affirm.

You see, under the just-proscribed Delegate System, a handful of criminally and filthily rich career politicians, largely kleptocratic robber-barons, in mainstream American parlance, easily and cheaply bought their way to the most powerful and influential topmost rungs of party tickets, so as to enable them to gain access to the collective resources and the common wealth of the country, thereby summarily preempting the survival of a merit-based system of the Popular Vote which more reflectively epitomized the inalienable and the inviolable sacred mandate of each and every legitimately registered Ghanaian voter and citizen.

The present electoral travesty which, presumably, was unconstitutionally originated by the presently ruling National Democratic Congress (NDC), officially founded by the late former President Jeremiah “Jerry” John Rawlings, Ghana’s longest-ruling and most extortionate junta capo, was almost simultaneously adopted and refined with a vengeance by the equally morbidly kleptocratic leadership of the so-called Center-Right main opposition New Patriotic Party (NPP). Yes, refined to extreme perfection with a vengeance because over the years, the NPP’s leadership which boastfully and self-righteously, albeit falsely prides itself in being an emulative beacon of impeccable democratic governance integrity, as well as a beacon of democratic best practice, has scandalously and vilely demonstrated itself to be relatively more niggardly and far more autocratic than its putatively more “revolutionary” and dictatorial National Democratic Congress counterpart, to the damnable extent of selecting a relatively far less representative pool of party delegates for its presidential and parliamentary elections.

Indeed, when the call has gone out and up for the country’s two major political party establishments, namely, the presently ruling National Democratic Congress and the New Patriotic Party, to scrap the delegate system and strictly adhere to the constitutionally stipulated popular-vote system - the so-called One Person, One Vote regime - the autocratic kneejerk riposte has been for the leaderships of the country’s major two political parties to wave the bugbear of prohibitive expenditure as a tangible reason to stick with the thoroughgoing corrupt status quo, almost as if the wholesomeness and the integrity of Ghana’s democratic culture was about anything and everything, except what it practically and officially claims to be about, electoral wholesomeness and democratic integrity.

Which was why in the wake of the Wednesday, July 29, 2026 landmark Supreme Court Decision, summarily scrapping the flagrantly and patently unconstitutional Delegate System of Presidential and Parliamentary Primaries, the Legal Affairs Director of the country’s main opposition New Patriotic Party, Mr. Gary Nimako Marfo, was widely reported to have pooh-poohed this most progressive Apex Court Decision as one that was inimically sought to grievously subvert the integrity of the very electoral process that it purports to enhance or strengthen, on the cynical grounds of the unwieldy financial burden that such decision is apt to unduly saddle the coffers of the country’s two major political parties.

Now, such blatantly cynical response to progress and innovation is downright hogwash if also because under the present Delegate System, only the filthy rich kleptocratic career politicians of both two major political parties are able to actively participate in the governance of the country to any remarkable or appreciable extent. It is also an open secret that, by and large, and this observation regarding the wanton profligacy of our multimillionaire and billionaire major party “shareholders,” as clearly distinguished from “stakeholders,” including their Presidential and Parliamentary Representatives, records of which can be readily accessed via cybermedia or the internet, the amounts of liquid cash that are routinely shelled out by the key operatives and the prime beneficiaries of the present Delegate System of electoral cannibalism are unarguably far in excess of the total cost of a Presidential and a Parliamentary Election conducted by popular vote.

It also comes as rather uncharacteristically refreshing to learn that the Supreme Court has ordered the complete and the total scrapping of the current Delegate System within the temporal space of a single calendar year. Plus, it is also untenably harebrained to hear the Legal Affairs Director of the New Patriotic Party smugly assert that all political parties in the country are “Voluntary Organizations.” Such cavalier and cranially obtuse corporatist characterization of our political party system is all the more reason why the Apex Court’s intervention could not have come at a more opportune moment.

It is also quite clear that Gary Nimako Marfo is most likely eagerly looking towards sharing the same prison cell with Chairman Wontumi - aka Mr. Bernard Antwi-Boasiako - sometime in the offing, thus his nose-thumbing and unspeakably asinine suggestion pointing to the purportedly “impractical implementation” of the Apex Court’s order to promptly scrap the current corruption-ridden Delegate Electoral System by replacing the latter with the Popular-Vote System. Goodluck, Mr. Sisyphus!!!

By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., PhD
Professor Emeritus, Department of English
SUNY-Nassau Community College
Garden City, New York
E-mail: [email protected]