Accra: Chairman of the Constitution Review Committee, Professor Kwasi Prempeh, has questioned the government's proposals to elect Metropolitan, Municipal and District Chief Executives (MMDCEs) on partisan lines, warning that such a move could shift attention away from its core local development priorities. Speaking on JoyNews monitored by GhanaWeb on August 4, 2026, Prof Prempeh explained that the Constitution Review Committee deliberately recommended that MMDCE elections be conducted on a non-partisan basis to preserve the focus on community development rather than national political rivalry.
According to Ghana Web, introducing political parties into local government elections would effectively create a third nationwide partisan election, with campaigns likely to be dominated by the New Patriotic Party (NPP) and the National Democratic Congress (NDC), instead of addressing the pressing needs of local communities. Prof Prempeh highlighted that the committee's intention was to ensure that local district elections focus solely on local issues, without the overshadowing influence of national political agendas.
"We proposed no party. And the justification was simple. We have enough party elections. We wanted the local district elections to be about local issues only," he said. Prof Prempeh emphasized that making local government elections party-based would nationalize the elections, leading to a situation where all the issues dominating these elections would revolve around the NPP, NDC, and political party confrontations, rather than the concerns of the locality.
Prof Prempeh additionally noted that the committee envisioned local elections as an opportunity for communities to focus on issues directly affecting them, including sanitation, public service delivery, and local development, without the influence of partisan politics. He argued that keeping district-level elections non-partisan would ensure that residents elect leaders based on their ability to solve local problems rather than their political affiliations.
"So that's where we veered in the direction of no party. At least there might be one election in our calendar that forces communities to focus on their problems and their local solutions, public service delivery, sanitation, and those things, and not let the parties come in and hijack it and turn it into a polarised national election," he stated.