…as Supreme Court blows up the patronage machine that kept constituencies starving
TNR Files
Yesterday, July 29, the Supreme Court handed down a ruling that sent tremors through the nation’s political elite. By a 5-2 majority, it struck down the delegate system the closed-door, handpicked process that for decades has determined who becomes a parliamentary candidate or a party flagbearer. Now, every registered, card-bearing party member must have a say.
The decision was hailed by civil society as a victory for grassroots democracy. But inside Parliament, the reaction was closer to pandemonium.
“The Supreme Court is acting on motion, thinking that this will reduce the cost of elections but that’s palpable false,” one MP told this reporter, speaking on condition of anonymity because he feared retribution from his party. “Rather, it will escalate the cost of elections in Ghana.”
Another lawmaker described MPs as “running helter-skelter” to reorganize their campaigns, suddenly forced to reach thousands more voters in their constituencies ahead of primaries a task for which many are ill-prepared.
Yet beneath the panic over logistics and budgets lies a more troubling question: will this ruling force politicians to actually deliver development, or will it simply give them a bigger, more expensive canvas on which to paint their old habits of vote-buying?
Under the now-defunct delegate system, a parliamentary aspirant needed only to woo a few hundred or at most a few thousand party delegates. These were often local party executives, polling station chairs, and loyalists. The math was simple: a relatively small pool of voters could be cultivated through targeted gifts, cash handouts, and promises of patronage.
“A candidate could buy a delegate for a few hundred cedis and secure a nomination,” said Dr. Nyaho Nyaho-Tamakloe, one of the three plaintiffs who brought the case. “That required no real effort to develop the constituency. You didn’t need to build schools, fix roads, or provide clean water. You just needed to pay the right people.”
The result, critics argue, was a generation of so-called “lazy politicians” MPs who, once elected, had little incentive to deliver tangible development, because their path to re-election depended not on the broader electorate but on a small, manageable coterie of delegates. Constituencies languished while incumbents focused on maintaining their delegate networks.
The Supreme Court’s ruling changes the calculus. Now, a candidate must appeal to every registered party member in the constituency potentially tens of thousands of voters. In theory, that means a candidate can no longer rely on buying a few hundred delegates; they must earn the trust of a mass base, which in turn could force them to point to concrete achievements.
“This is the only way to break the cycle of transactional politics,” argued Christine Amoako-Nuamah, another plaintiff. “If you have to face thousands of voters, you cannot bribe them all. You have to show them what you have done.”
But the law of unintended consequences looms large. The cost of a primary campaign has just skyrocketed. Where a candidate once spent a few thousand cedis on delegate meetings, they now face the prospect of printing ballots, hiring polling staff, renting venues, and transporting materials across the entire constituency an exercise that could easily run into hundreds of thousands of cedis.
And that, say analysts, creates a perverse incentive: candidates who previously spent modest sums to buy delegates may now spend enormous sums to buy entire communities. “Money will still talk,” warned Prof. Kwame A. Ninsin, a constitutional scholar. “The difference is that instead of buying 500 delegates, you buy 5,000 voters with cash, with ‘community projects’ that appear overnight, with all the trappings of populist largesse.”
The ruling gives parties one year to rewrite their constitutions and redesign their internal elections. But the harder question is whether this institutional shift will translate into better governance.
Some MPs are already strategizing. One senior NPP member, speaking on background, admitted that the ruling “forces us to think differently” but quickly added that “we will find ways to reach the members.” When pressed on whether that meant more community engagement or more handouts, he laughed nervously and declined to elaborate.
For voters like Kwame Mensah, a trader in Accra’s central market, the ruling is welcome but not enough. “The politicians have been buying us with small things for years,” he said. “Now they will have to buy us with bigger things or maybe they will finally work for us. We shall see.”
The financial burden of the expanded primaries will fall squarely on the parties themselves and, by extension, on candidates. Gary Nimako, lawyer for the NPP, openly questioned who will foot the bill. “The parties?” he asked, visibly exasperated outside the Supreme Court. He hinted at a possible return to court to challenge aspects of the ruling, suggesting that the cost alone could be a legal battleground.
The National Democratic Congress (NDC), which historically runs larger delegate congresses than its rival, is also bracing for an exponential increase. One party official estimated that the cost of a nationwide primary could exceed 50 million cedis a figure that neither party has budgeted for.
The ruling presents Ghanaian politics with a clear fork. One path leads to a more accountable, development-oriented political class, where MPs must earn their nomination through visible service to their constituents. The other path leads to an even more expensive, more vulgar form of money politics, where the scale of bribery simply grows to match the size of the electorate.
Which path Ghana takes will depend on vigilance from civil society, from the media, and from voters themselves. The Supreme Court has opened the door. Whether politicians will walk through it with integrity or with wallets full of cash remains to be seen.
For now, the panic in Parliament is real. But the silence from the constituencies the countless voters who have waited years for roads, clinics, and schools is deafening. They are watching. And they may finally have a vote that counts.