Governance expert, Prof Baffour Agyemang Duah, is skeptical about relying on political parties and individual goodwill for effective governance.

Speaking on Joy FM’s Super Morning Show, Prof Duah emphasised the urgent need for structural changes to ensure accountability and meaningful decentralisation in Ghana.

“I have become very pessimistic about still putting our trust in parties and individuals and their goodwill. I don’t believe in that anymore,” Prof Duah stated.

He highlighted that without altering the underlying structures, efforts by the media and institutions to hold the government accountable would be futile.

He pointed out the persistent issue of unfulfilled political promises.

“Despite the glaring failure of meeting promises, today they are still giving promises that are even more awesome than previous ones.”

Prof Duah called for constitutional provisions to mandate decentralisation, suggesting that the media and Civil Society Organisations should play a pivotal role in this process.

“We have only achieved administrative decentralization, now let’s look for political decentralization as well as fiscal decentralization then we can go on to discuss the Ghana we want,” he stated.

Prof Duah emphasised the need to empower local communities, advocating for greater autonomy and independence at the district level.

“We need to begin to capacitate local people to take charge of their own lives. Let’s give the districts some room and independence to think, plan and implement," he said.

The Dean of the Law School at the University for Professional Studies, Accra (UPSA), Prof. Ernest Kofi Abotsi, on the same show, noted the significant role media plays in holding leaders accountable.

Noting that the country’s media has not adequately lived up to the task, the lawyer said the media is to set the marking scheme per the promises of the political actors and hold them to those campaign promises.

“We heard you make promise X, and we played the promise back to Ghanaians, in respect of that, we want to check whether you have fulfilled it by a certain benchmark. This would make politicians careful in the promises they make".