OPINION: Their elections … versus our elections

On 27 May 2024, the former prime minister of the United Kingdom Rishi Sunak announced that elections were to be held in the UK. In accordance with the British political system, a prime minister can call a general election at any point during his or her tenure, and for several reasons. It could be to test the popularity of the PM and the ruling party, or consolidate the party’s position in power.

Once he made the call, the doors opened for election campaigning to begin.

All that ended in six weeks. The elections took place on 4 July 2024. By the next day, a new prime minister was already in office, in a seamless transition.

The beauty was in the changeover. By early morning on 5 July, the new PM, Keir Starmer, was already operating from No 10 Downing Street, meeting and announcing cabinet ministers in his new government.

It was impressive that everybody understood their role in the big picture. There was no ballot snatching; no electoral body bantering with political parties; no registration and re-registration of voters; no bloody fights; no macho men wielding machetes. No incidents were recorded of registered voters being unable to find their name at a polling station where they had registered and expected to vote.

In all this, everything worked according to the established rules of engagement, and within 24 hours of the vote the new PM was in office. There was no transition period, therefore no joint transition committee. There was no elaborate swearing-in, to which half the world leaders are invited to participate in what should reasonably be a one-hour event.

All that matters is that Keir Starmer is prime minister of the United Kingdom, having been voted into office by the people.

Ends, not means

In sharp contrast, people should cast their minds to the dear Republic of Ghana, where elections are “All die be die”, or “boot for boot”, or “do or die”, or are generally described using the language of war and doomsday. Elections in Ghana have been variously compared or have threatened to be like the war in  Afghanistan or the Arab Spring. The whole mindset about elections is so wrong that one would think they are a nasty chore, imposed on the nation by a wicked stepmother.

To start with, the 1992 constitution mandates presidential and parliamentary elections every FOUR years. One would reason that the period of elections would centre around just before the established date for voting. Not so Ghana. Every day of the four-year cycle is for electioneering. How else can one explain that a party wins an election and straight away starts thinking about how to win the next election which is four years away? In the process, elections become an end in themselves, instead of providing an opportunity for service to the people now.

Consider the processes Ghanaians go through in order to vote. People have to get a Ghana Card, or persuade two registered voters to travel the distance to the district office of the Electoral Commission in order to register to vote. In summary, one goes through any number of processes: registration, exhibition and verification of register, et cetera. Then comes the loud presence of an Electoral Commission which flaunts its “independence” more than its integrity and fairness. A whole constituency can be barred from the electoral process by administrative bungling, without redress.

Political campaigns in Ghana are from another world – big-time and expensive events, not like the town-hall-type meetings elsewhere. It is at these rallies that political actors usually pep up or incite their plebeian following into a frenzy for anything goes. Are the stories of vote buying, cash-filled envelopes, bentoa, kako, television sets et al all true?

When all is done and an election has been conducted, then come the other shenanigans of beating/shooting to kill opponents, counting, collation of votes and the Oscar-type announcement of results.

This is normally followed by a transition period of one month. Some people refer to this transition period as an opportunity to hide files and conceal evidence, while the acrimony of the election festers into the transition, with seizures of cars, public spaces and many other areas/sectors subject to handing over.

Mahama’s simple precedent

Now comes the swearing-in of the new parliament, just before the president is sworn in. The president must swear the oath of office before Parliament. It should be a simple event that shouldn’t last more than an hour.

There is a precedent that supports this assertion. The former president John Dramani Mahama was sworn in to office on the first occasion in the chamber of Parliament on 24 July 2012, upon the death of the late President Atta Mills. The ceremony was so simple and it harms no one to institutionalise it for its simplicity. There were no foreign guests to create a diplomatic nightmare and there was minimum expenditure, with the same result.

Any observer from the UK who happens to see the way we organise elections here will conclude that we make so much capital out of our elections, to the detriment of governance, service to our people and development.

What is your view?

The writer, Kwame Tenkorang, is a former envoy from Ghana to Libya, Japan and Kenya, and is the serving secretary of the Council on Foreign Relations Ghana

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