The Ghanaian Journal

The reported poor attendance of the National Delegates Congress of the Great Consolidated Popular Party (GCPP) held in Kumasi over the weekend, has once again raised questions about the registration of political parties in the country by the Electoral Commission.

The last two years has witnessed the mushrooming of political parties in the country, but hardly would one see their real physical presence in the various constituencies across the country. In fact some of them just exist on paper. Indeed, if GCPP is a well-organized party that has followers, it would not have suffered the Kumasi humiliation where less than a hundred, out of the expected 1,300 delegates attended.

The party could not even organize congresses in all the 10 regions, except for the Northern Region, as mandated by law. Apart from the GCPP, there are other parties who only have political dominance on the radio stations as they hop from one station to another, making all kinds of political talk, while a visit to the countryside would reveal that the people do not even know about their existence.

The fact that Democracy is the order of the day does not mean that we should cheapen it to the level that we find it now. We need to put stringent measures in place before people start to form political parties like the formation of NGOs. Some few years ago, as many as 39 political parties contested elections in the Republic of Guinea, whose population is not even up to ten million. The Chronicle does not think this is a good example that Ghana should emulate.

We, therefore, call on the EC to come out with modalities that would discourage rampant formation of political parties. In addition to this all the existing laws about the formation and registration of political parties should also be enforced. The Chronicle also calls on the EC to do background checks to ascertain if buildings purported to have been acquired by yet to be registered political parties had genuinely been acquired for that purpose.

We are raising this issue because if these mushrooming political parties have their functioning offices in at least two thirds of the 230 constituencies, they would have been seen as vibrant parties and not just existing on paper, as Ghanaians are witnessing now. The government cannot afford to use the taxpayer’s money to print so many names on the ballot paper for elections, when one could see clearly that some of the names are nothing but that of mere political jokers. The EC should not entertain this.