Author: Evans Senior Owu: Climate Policy Professional & Columnist
On Thursday, July 30, 2026, the government made its position known. Attorney General Dr. Dominic Ayine presented the Mahama government’s position paper on the Constitutional Review Committee report.
The committee, chaired by Professor H. Kwesi Prempeh, had submitted its findings to President Mahama in February. Government sorted its response into three categories: accept, accept in principle with modification, and reject.
Both the full committee report and the government position paper are expected to be published soon, for the benefit of public scrutiny. Even so, one item in the position paper already deserves close attention. It is the plan for electing Metropolitan, Municipal and District Chief Executives, commonly known as MMDCEs.
Government accepted, in principle, the committee’s call for MMDCEs to be elected rather than appointed. This is welcome. Government rejected the committee’s phased rollout, in which only assemblies that meet a financial threshold would hold elections first. This too can be defended on grounds of fairness.
But government did not stop there. It altered the method of election itself. Under the new proposal, the President will nominate five persons for each district, two of whom must be women. A vetting committee then screens the five down to three. Only these three may contest. This is where the disagreement begins.
This design is not new caution. It is an old habit wearing a new name. Ghana has debated MMDCE elections for more than a decade, and the direction of that debate has been consistent. During his first term, President Akufo-Addo pursued a constitutional amendment to allow MMDCEs to be elected on a partisan basis. The plan required changes to Article 55(3) and Article 243(1) of the Constitution.
A referendum was scheduled for December 2019, alongside district-level elections. It never happened. The National Democratic Congress and a broad coalition of civil society actors opposed the partisan element specifically, not the principle of election itself. Faced with that resistance, President Akufo-Addo cancelled the referendum.
The lesson from that episode was clear enough. Ghanaians wanted their local leaders elected. They did not want that election captured by party politics. Seven years on, the current proposal claims to honour that lesson by keeping the process non-partisan. On paper, it does. In practice, it replaces one gatekeeper with another.
Instead of parties choosing candidates, the President chooses five, and a committee narrows that list to three. The people vote, but only among names the Presidency has already filtered. Call it what it is: a softer form of the same executive control that Ghanaians have spent thirty years trying to loosen.
The Ashanti Regional Minister, Dr Frank Amoakohene defend this design differently. His argument runs as follows. The President carries national responsibility for development. Members of Parliament represent the people, but MMDCEs represent the President and implement national policy at the district level.
Article 243 of the 1992 Constitution already makes MMDCEs part of the executive branch. If MMDCEs are elected with no presidential input at all, executive accountability could weaken, and a President elected on a national manifesto could struggle to deliver that manifesto evenly across districts.
This argument does not hold up well against the record. Ghana’s experience under successive governments shows that executive accountability through party manifestos is exactly the arrangement that has struggled.
Every transfer of power between the two dominant parties has come with the abandonment of the previous administration’s development programmes, simply because those programmes carried a rival party’s label.
The National Development Planning Commission offers a steadier alternative. Its medium-term development frameworks are built for MMDAs and tailored to local conditions, independent of which party sits in government.
Top-down accountability, in which the Presidency appoints and directs local leadership, has not delivered the outcomes the current constitutional provisions promised. It is time to test the alternative. Let local people choose the persons who will serve them, without a presidential shortlist standing between the voter and the ballot.
None of this is an argument against reform. The country needs elected MMDCEs, and government deserves credit for accepting that principle after years of delay. But the manner of election matters as much as the fact of election.
A non-partisan ballot that still begins with a presidential nomination is not the bottom-up accountability Ghanaians have been asking for. It is a compromise that protects executive influence while wearing the language of decentralisation.
The Government should therefore reconsider this part of its position before the referendum bill is finalised. Ghanaians have waited more than a decade for this reform. They should not have to accept or reject a diluted version of it now.
READ ALSO: Supreme Court Dismisses Suit Against OSP, Upholds Prosecutorial Powers
