General News of Wednesday, 20 October 2021
Source: www.ghanaweb.com
2021-10-20
Yaw Buaben Asamoa is the Director of Communications of the NPP
• Confirmation of MMDCEs characterised by chaos
• Calls for MMDCEs to be elected yield no results
• Continued appointment of MMDCEs attributed to weak system
The Director of Communications of the New Patriotic Party (NPP), Yaw Buaben Asamoa, has bemoaned the lapses that exist in the constitutional arrangement that allows only the president to nominate people for all the MMDAs in the country.
He explained that even with the massive support that the president gets in matters of such nature, the fallouts of the nominations always go to prove the point that the system is troubled.
“Largely, many of them were confirmed but the places where they were not confirmed, quite a few were quite contentious and very frustrating. And it goes to expose the weaknesses of the current system that one person, that’s the president, in spite of all the institutional support that he has, ends up nominating people who cause such an emotional stir at local levels, shows how difficult the system is.”
“So, for those places, how do you determine that those resisting also have the right person in mind? That’s another thing, and who’s voice is the majority when a person is being rejected? Is it the majority who are rejecting? Is it the people or otherwise?” he said.
Yaw Buaben Asamoa said this when he spoke with GhanaWeb on the sidelines of the 2021 Ghana Speaks Lecture organized by the Institute for Democratic Governance (IDEG) on the theme Reconstructing Local Governance and Multiparty Democracy in the 4th Republic: Proposals, in Accra.
He also went on to explain that there is the need to properly interrogate this current arrangement so that it does not continue to encourage certain people from feeling like they wield so much power to undermine choices of the nominating authority.
“All those questions will better be dealt with in an environment of free elections because elections have a way of determining who the majority prefer. It will then eliminate this sense of majoritarian excess in the sense that some constitute themselves as the majority and go against the choir of the president and they insist on going against it in all manner of ways,” he said.
