For thirty years, Ghanaians have complained about the same thing: a District Chief Executive who owes their job to the President and answers to nobody else. The Constitutional Review Committee, chaired by Prof. H. Kwasi Prempeh, was supposed to fix that. Its report recommended amending Article 243 of the Constitution so that Metropolitan, Municipal and District Chief Executives are elected directly by the people they serve, on a strictly non-partisan basis, rolled out gradually through an independent Devolution Commission. Cabinet approved the broad idea.

A bill is expected before Parliament before the end of the year. An Institute of Economic Affairs survey found close to seven in ten Ghanaians in favour.

By every measure, this should be a rare moment of consensus in a country where consensus is scarce.

It is not turning out that way. In the past week, Prof. Prempeh, the man who chaired the committee that proposed this reform, has publicly said the government's own position on it has "thrown a spanner in the works." 

Political commentator John Darko has asked, pointedly, why government should be the one choosing three candidates for voters to pick from. And Martin Adjei-Mensah Korsah, who ran the Local Government Ministry under the previous NPP administration, has gone further: he says the arrangement government has put forward is, in substance, no different from what it claims to be replacing.

The disagreement is not about whether MMDCEs should be elected. Everyone from the CRC to the ruling NDC to the opposition NPP has said, at different points, that they should be. The disagreement is about the fine print of how a "non-partisan" election actually gets run, and that fine print is where the one-party state warnings are coming from.

The mechanism behind the warning

Here is what has been proposed: political authorities would nominate five candidates for an MMDCE race, from whom three would be shortlisted to actually appear on the ballot. Voters would then choose between those three in what is labelled a non-partisan contest.

Strip away the label and look at who controls the funnel. If the nominating and shortlisting is effectively run through government or party-aligned structures, then the "non-partisan" ballot voters eventually see has already been curated by partisan hands before a single vote is cast. Korsah's objection captures this precisely: a competitive election that has quietly excluded your political opponents before the contest even starts is not really competitive. It is the current appointment system wearing a ballot box as a costume.

This is not a hypothetical concern imported from Ghana's one-party history under Nkrumah, though the comparison is what gives the warning its bite. It is a much more mundane and more plausible risk: incumbency, state resources and local party machinery quietly deciding who gets to run in 261 districts, dressed up as grassroots democracy. A ruling party does not need to abolish elections to dominate local government. It only needs to control who is allowed to stand in them.

Why the "non-partisan" label was never going to be enough on its own

Ghana's two major parties have spent three decades building local dominance partly through control of who gets appointed to district office. The MMDCE seat sits at the intersection of development project allocation, contractor relationships and the day-to-day organisational infrastructure that keeps a party alive between elections. Removing party logos from the ballot paper does nothing to touch any of that if the people doing the nominating still answer to party structures.

This is precisely why Prof. Prempeh's committee did not simply recommend "non-partisan elections" and stop there. It paired the recommendation with a genuinely independent Devolution Commission, meant to sit outside government and determine the sequence, criteria and readiness of districts for elections, a structural safeguard, not just a procedural label. If government's actual implementation swaps that independent architecture for a five-nominate-three-shortlist model run through political authorities, it has kept the popular headline of the reform while hollowing out the part that was supposed to make it work.

What would actually guard against the risk?

Three things would tell Ghanaians whether this reform is real or cosmetic. First, who does the nominating: if it is not a body genuinely insulated from the ruling party, the non-partisan label is decorative. Second, whether the process is transparent enough that a shortlisted-out candidate can show, publicly, why they were excluded right now; that scrutiny does not exist. Third, whether the phased rollout, which is otherwise a sensible way to manage a reform this large, becomes a tool for sequencing which districts vote first based on political convenience rather than genuine readiness.

None of this is an argument against electing MMDCEs. The case for it, on accountability grounds, is sound, and the public appetite for it is real and overwhelming. But a reform this significant deserves scrutiny proportional to its consequences, not applause proportional to its headline. Ghana has been here before: a popular constitutional idea, broad consensus, and an implementation process where the details quietly do the opposite of what the label promises.

The question worth asking before this bill reaches Parliament is not whether MMDCEs should be elected. It is who decides which names Ghanaians are allowed to choose from and whether that answer looks any different from the system we are supposedly leaving behind.

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