[ 2016-09-28 ]

Assembly system outmoded; MMDCEs must be elected – Kyei Baffour
On the back of the fracas over the election of a
Presiding Member for the Kumasi Metropolitan
Assembly (KMA), a Local Governance analyst, George
Kyei Baffour, believes the way forward for the
Assemblies is to embrace their underlying
partisanship.

Mr. Kyei Baffour, a former presiding member
himself, asserted that, “at this stage, we will
not be able to right the wrongs in respect to the
current constitutional and legal arrangements,
looking at the acrimonious nature of the political
terrain so the best thing to do is to go
partisan.”

Mr. Kyei Baffour rubbished claims that,
Ghaanaians could not be trusted to elect qualified
persons at the Assembly level, as he argued that
“Ghanaians have the mental orientation to elect
their president and their members of parliament so
they should be able to elect their Mayors
[Metropolitan Chief Executives].”

“Let’s scrap the government appointee 30
percent thing. We should do away with it because
it is archaic, it is outmoded, it is of no use…
Let’s allow parties to nominate their candidates
to contest on their tickets for the DCE and the
Assembly members, so the people will have their
mandate to elect their own leader.”

The KMA’s troubles

The KMA’s attempts to elect a Presiding Member
since November 2015, have failed, and Mr. Kyei
Baffour opined that, the Assembly’s problems are
not “being resolved because it is deeply rooted
in partisan entrenched positions.”

The latest sitting of elections yesterday
[Tuesday], even saw some fisticuffs as an Assembly
Member traded blows with a National Democratic
Congress (NDC) serial caller, during the
proceedings.

According to Mr. Kyei Baffour, the two main
political parties, the governing NDC and the
opposition New Patriotic Party (NPP), have been
supporting candidates behind the scenes in
Kumasi.

He also said “about 95 percent of the appointees
to the assembly by the President belong to the
party of the President” and that contributed to
the problems.

“The fact that very key elements within the NDC
in the region were appointed as government
appointees to the assembly; so by extension, the
Assembly is divided on partisan lines between the
NDC and the NPP.”

Source - citifmonline.com

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