The president of Ghana should not be given the authority to appoint metropolitan, municipal, and district chief executives (MMDCEs), a senior research fellow at the Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA), Dr Ransford Gyampo, has proposed.
He believed such officers should be elected into office so that people other than members of the incumbent party join in running the country.
“There should be direct elections of all MMDA members on a full-scale partisan basis in order to let the local people feel that: ‘We contested an election, we lost miserably, but we still have an opportunity to elect whoever will govern us at the grassroots,’” he admonished.
His suggestion was at a roundtable in Accra on Wednesday August 31, where he added that such a system would strengthen democracy as individuals will elect their own leaders at that level. He believed individuals from all political persuasions can be elected to public office and bring an end to the ‘winner takes all’ phenomenon.
“I think that will soothe the pain that [would have made] our politics do-or-die. … The feeling that you have lost everything at the national level and knowing that it’s the same at the local level will make politics a do-or-die affair,” he added.
Source: Ghana/AccraFM.com
