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30.08.2012 Editorial

EDITORIAL: Let's Reconsider Winner-Takes-All Policy

By Daily Graphic
EDITORIAL: Let039;s Reconsider Winner-Takes-All Policy
30.08.2012 LISTEN

One of the major challenges confronting the national development agenda is the absence of an agreed development programme.

As a result, every government comes into office with a new set of development programmes and objectives based on that government’s political party manifesto.

What is disheartening to our body-politic is the fact that if a new government decides to continue with a project initiated by a previous regime, the government is painted as lacking ideas to initiate new programmes.

Thus, the new government tends to ignore projects initiated by the previous regime. The consequences of these is the widespread of uncompleted projects littered across the country.

Our plight is worsened by the “winner-takes-all” policy of our governance system in which the party in power not only decides everything without recourse to opposing views but also dismisses skilled civil servants because of perceived political allegiance to the previous government. It is the country that has suffered in the long term as a result of such policies.

Such is the situation that the President of the Pontifical Commission for Justice and Peace of the Vatican, His Eminence Peter Cardinal Appiah Turkson observed Wednesday that the practice had turned the country’s politics and elections for political power into a “fight for livelihood.”

In certain political jurisdictions such as the United States of America (USA), provision is made for some officials of an existing government to stay on to introduce the new officials to the operations of government machinery. Most of the time, however, the civil servants remain untouched and that explains that an Ambassador can stay on to serve out his or tenure. The only change may come in the area of foreign policy objectives and how to achieve them.

We daresay that some of the judgement debts bedevilling our country could have been avoided if some officials had remained at post to supervise and advise the new government appropriately.

It is in that vein that we are saddened by the decision of the government not to accept the recommendation of the Constitutional Review Commission for the country to allow the National Development Planning Commission (NDPC) to set out a national development agenda that will be binding on all governments.

The Daily Graphic thinks that allowing the NDPC to develop a national development programme will stop any political party from implementing its programmes for the country. After all, all the political parties campaign on the issues of education, health, housing, employment, agriculture, energy, water and waste management among others. The only difference may come in the priorities of the political parties.

If there is one area which the country has suffered most as a result of this hanky-panky nature of our politics, it is the way we are addressing the Senior High School brouhaha. From the outset of the reforms from 1987 till now, the two major political parties have tossed us about with not only the number of years to be spent in school but even the name of the system.

We think it is high time the nation thought about this winner-takes-all governance system and also agreed on a national development programme that would be binding on all governments irrespective of which political party in power.

This is the only way we can move our people out of the challenges of poverty, disease, illiteracy and squalor that stare them in the face.

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