Determining the Legitimacy of Political Parties

The recent call by the former Speaker of Ghana's parliament for the transfer of some of the regulatory powers of the Electoral Commission (EC) over legitimately registered political parties to the High Court of Justice ought to be considered with great care. This is because a significantly disempowered Electoral Commission runs the risk of being rendered otiose, or practically irrelevant, to the country's fledgling democratic political process (Statesman 1/30/08).

What needs to be done is to broker such crucial regulatory powers as the EC's right to suspend and/or revoke the registration of political parties, for whatever infractions may be deemed to have been committed, between the EC and the appropriate division of the judiciary, preferably the Fast-Track Court, or even special sessions of both the Court of Appeal and the Supreme Court.

According to Mr. Peter Ala Adjetey, the former Speaker, the discretionary powers of the Electoral Commission, as they now stand, may implicitly have something to do with the fact that the EC was instituted by the so-called National Democratic Congress (NDC), a patently oxymoronic political party morphed as such from its original existence as a pseudo-civilian dictatorship. Consequently, the salutary development of Ghanaian democracy during the last eight years of New Patriotic Party rule necessitates the consonant democratization of the operations of the Electoral Commission.

Mr. Adjetey also reportedly told two parliamentary standing committees that the 1992 Constitution, on the basis of which the political culture of Ghana's Fourth Republic is predicated, is overly detailed and practically inflexible. If so, then, of course, nothing prevents our august National Assembly from revisiting all the umpteen previous Ghanaian constitutions in order to facilitate an effective and auspicious revision of the current Constitution. It goes without saying, of course, that Ghanaians have the inauspicious combination of both civilian and military dictatorships to blame for our current constitutional quagmire.

Not very long ago, for instance, Mr. Adjetey went on record as claiming that the 1992 Constitution granted such unsavory peremptory powers to the presidency as to virtually undermine the traditional balance of power – or checks and balances – that ought to exist among the executive, legislative and the judicial arms of government. Curiously, however, none of our legal mavens appears to have deemed it either expedient or even pertinent to point out such juridical bottlenecks during the first eight years that the so-called National Democratic Congress (NDC) virtually ruled as a one-party government.

Regarding the proposed funding of political parties, extreme care ought to be taken to ensure that scarce economic resources are not, literally, poured into a sinkhole. And unless the campaign finances of the major participants in such funding exercise, or process, are strictly monitored and periodically audited, to ensure that none engages in mischief, the entire process may yet prove to be a grand exercise in futility.

At the moment, we would rather that the taxpayer's hard-earned dole is fully committed to the country's socioeconomic development. For chances are that any politician or political party that is incapable of raising the requisite funding resources to contest elections may not, given an electoral mandate, be able to effectively manage the affairs of the country.

There is also absolutely no guarantee, whatsoever, that taxpayer funding of political parties would drastically, or even remarkably, reduce the incidence of corruption in government. The best antidote to the latter canker inheres squarely in the collective vigilance of the people at large and, even more significantly, the stringent enforcement of anti-corruption laws already on the books, as it were.

The funding of political parties may also create an unsavory state of affairs, whereby prospective politicians and political parties would increasingly come to automatically expect such funding as their inviolable right or entitlement. Also, generally speaking, knowing many a Ghanaian politician for the pathological litigant that s/he invariably is, the introduction of political-party funding may yet witness mounds of dockets in our judicial system, thus inadvertently contributing to the effective derailment of the very democratic political culture that we seek to strengthen.

*Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D., is Associate Professor of English and Journalism at Nassau Community College of the State University of New York, Garden City. E-mail: [email protected].