Ghana turns 70 years old next year and our 33-year-old Fourth Republic democracy is paying a huge price in integrity, especially in our elections.
A deeply rooted systemic flaw in our electoral culture, deliberately sustained by our collective hypocrisy, weak and inconsistent regulatory enforcement.
Vote buying is no more considered a scandal, but an expected delegates “pacification ritual” for a few selfish representatives as a demonstration of a candidate’s preparedness.
This sale of allegiance gives elected leaders a false moral right to do wrong because they have paid us, one-off, for the mandate we freely give them.
Allegations fly, but who is truly innocent to point fingers at who?
We wail and cry foul mostly when tables turn against us. We are reluctant and hesitate in tackling it, fearing it will open a can of worms, a Pandora box of uncomfortable truths and consequences we are not ready to face.
Ghana’s electoral laws clearly criminalise vote buying and selling. Section 33 of the Representation of the People Law, 1992 outlaws it.
A survey by National Commission for Civic Education 2024, indicated that 64% of respondents believe vote buying influences election outcomes.
Multiple studies and numerous election reports indicate most major political parties in Ghana, including the New Patriotic Party (NPP) and the National Democratic (NDC) have been accused of this act in both internal party elections and national elections for decades.
It is a crime that has gone on for decades without sanctions, so it has been:
Shades of investigations.
Shams of conversations.
Noise without consequence.
Since crime does not have expiry date, when do retrospective sanctions take effect? Who has benefited from it and who is the “unlucky one?”
Ghana operates a winner-takes-all democracy, where power is bought and sold across all party hierarchies.
Ballot boxes have turned into marketplaces, where greed becomes the currency of choice. A shamefully normalized illegal tender for power acquisition.
Elected representatives now represent not the people, but themselves and their parties because they believe their votes were mostly bought directly or indirectly.
Warped under gifts, transport allowance, benevolence, sometimes blatant cash inducements, Vote buying has become a huge political campaign investment that must be recouped when power is won.
One now wonders how a constitutional privilege to serve and represent your own people has now become a very commercial, high profit-oriented investment business.
Conscience sold cheap, our destiny leased on credit to the highest bidder, with that goes our national development and collective progress is mortgaged away. Petty gifts blinding our judgement of red flags, misfits, and ineptitude.
The result is the repeated devastation by a terrible, unnatural disaster that for decades has plagued our land, far worse than any hurricanes, tsunamis, or earthquakes: poor leadership across all levels of our country, turning all the natural blessings of this land into woeful curses.
So yes, casting first stones is strictly for the sinless. So many will say:
Who never messed up, hands in the air?
No one?
Who never messed up?
Anyone? (Kwaku Killa’s voice)
However, until we admit our shame and collective responsibility, this cycle will keep repeating itself. It definitively must end at some point for electoral sanity to prevail.
All political colours must commit to change; buyers, sellers and onlookers alike.
But for now, of course, we have messed up!
