The government's position paper on the recommendations of the 2025 Constitution Review Committee accepts many of the proposed reforms but rejects or modifies some key recommendations on local governance and decentralisation.
This is significant because the current review process is intended to address longstanding weaknesses in Ghana's Fourth Republican constitutional order, extending a reform agenda first initiated by the late President John Evans Atta Mills in 2010.
The issue, therefore, is not simply whether specific recommendations are accepted or rejected, but whether the review will deliver meaningful institutional change or merely reproduce existing arrangements in modified forms.
Where government departs from proposals designed to strengthen democratic governance and decentralisation, the justification warrants scrutiny to ensure that the broader reform agenda is not diluted.
Reform or replication
The government's position on electing MMDCEs highlights a broader question about the direction of constitutional reform. Under its proposal, the President would nominate candidates, following which three vetted nominees would contest a public election.
While the government justifies this approach as necessary to balance local autonomy with the requirements of a unitary state, the model raises important constitutional, democratic and institutional concerns.
This paper argues that although the proposal replaces presidential appointment with election, it does not fully address the central challenge that has driven the decentralisation debate for over three decades: the need to strengthen downward accountability and citizen choice of local leaders.
Accordingly, the critical question is whether the proposed model by the government genuinely empowers citizens to elect leaders of their choice and hold them accountable or merely reproduces existing weaknesses under the label of popular election.
Value
The first issue is that the proposal of the government may change the procedure without solving the underlying accountability challenges, since the President maintains his power of nomination before the Pubic Services Commission vets, then citizens make their choice from the President’s nominees.
So, in effect:
• Current system: President nominates → Assembly confirms.
• Proposed system: President nominates → PSC vets → citizens choose.
The confirming body changes, but presidential control at the entry point remains.
This matters because the longstanding concern with the current system is not simply that assembly members confirm MMDCEs.
The deeper concern, reflected in studies on Ghana’s decentralisation, is that MMDCEs tend to be more accountable upward to the President than downward to the citizens they govern.
So, if access to office and possibly re-election, still depends on presidential nomination, that political dependence remains.
The proposed reform may therefore not solve the fundamental problem of downward accountability to the electorate but rather maintain it to the President.
Does a unitary state justify presidential control over MMDCE candidature?
Among the justifications for maintaining presidential gatekeeping is the fear of breaking the unitary-state system of the country.
A justification that may have lost its place.
In fact, comparative experience shows that unitary states, including Japan, South Korea, Colombia, Peru, Italy and the United Kingdom, allow citizens to directly elect local executives without central government selecting the candidates.
In African countries such as Sierra Leone, Zambia and Senegal, citizens directly elect their mayors.
These countries preserve national coherence through legislation, fiscal oversight, administrative supervision and national policy standards.
The key lesson is that central oversight does not require central control over candidature. Ghana can remain a unitary state while allowing local communities to determine who contests and leads at the local level.
Popular voting or restricted electoral choice?
An election is meaningful not simply because citizens cast ballots, but because they have a genuine choice of candidates.
Under the government's proposal, all candidates must first be nominated by the President.
In Ghana's Fourth Republic, Presidents have consistently appointed party-affiliated individuals to MMDCE positions, raising concerns that the pool of candidates would remain largely confined to those deemed acceptable to the governing party.
As a result, a highly respected and widely supported local leader could be excluded from contesting simply because they are not nominated.
This concern is not merely theoretical. It has been echoed by practitioners, including former Accra Mayor and MP for Ablekuma South, Alfred Okoe Vanderpuije, who has argued that MMDCE elections should be open and not subject to Executive control.
If competence is the objective, this can be safeguarded through clear eligibility criteria and independent verification rather than presidential gatekeeping.
A more democratic model would therefore be: Open candidature → Objective qualification → Independent verification → Election.
Electoral calendar and institutional coherence
The proposal risks complicating Ghana’s already crowded electoral calendar.
The central concern is not just electoral calendar distortions per se, but the implications of the Government's proposed model for the coherence of local governance.
Because MMDCE candidates would first have to be nominated by a newly elected President and vetted before elections can be held, MMDCE elections would inevitably occur separately from District Assembly elections.
This raises an important question: if MMDCEs are part of the same local government system as Assembly Members, would this model not lead to a detachment of the two elections?
Thus, the government’s current proposal risks creating a misalignment, an additional electoral cycle, increasing costs, administrative complexity and voter fatigue, while weakening the integration of local democratic processes.
Conclusion and way forward
There is broad consensus that MMDCEs should be elected. However, disagreement over the mode of election has delayed reform for decades.
The government's preferred approach appears to reflect what Emeritus Professor Atsu Ayee describes as a "morbid fear" of relinquishing central control over district assemblies, a position that sits uneasily with the principles of decentralisation and democratic local governance.
The issue is not whether the government should retain oversight of local government, but whether such oversight requires the President to determine who citizens can elect.
Comparative experience shows that it does not. Central oversight can be maintained without restricting electoral choice.
If Ghana is to elect MMDCEs, the reform must address the original problem that inspired the demand for change: the excessive upward accountability of local executives to the centre.
Constitutional reform should correct this democratic deficit, not reproduce it under the label of popular election.
Alternative approaches exist. Both IDEG and the 2025 Constitution Review Committee have proposed mechanisms to develop the modalities for a more comprehensive, inclusive and democratic local governance system.
The constitutional review process presents a rare opportunity to build a genuinely democratic local governance system, and Ghana should seize it.
Who contests should be determined through an open, fair and pragmatic democratic process that gives citizens a genuine choice of local leaders.
The writer is a development practitioner
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