The Executive Director of the Ghana Centre for Democratic Development (CDD-Ghana), Professor Henry Kwasi Prempeh, has bemoaned the rising cost of elections in the country.
“Since 2004, we have tracked closely the steadily growing concern of the intersection of money and political power.
This is not a new concern for us. But it has become, over the course of our research, an urgent one,” he stated.
“In 2012, the estimated cost of winning a parliamentary seat in Ghana (primaries and general election) stood at GHc124, 000. By 2020, that same seat cost approximately GHc 4 million (app. $350,000), which includes the cost of what is called 'nurturing the constituency'. That is a 3,125 per cent increase in eight years.
This is the cost of seeking to represent the people in Parliament,” he stated in an interview with the Daily Graphic.
Presidential
Prof. Prempeh explained that the picture at the presidential level was virtually the same.
“The average nomination and filing fees alone for presidential primaries across our two major parties, the NPP and NDC, rose from GH¢72,500 in 2016 to GH¢440,000 in 2024; that is a 507 per cent increase in less than a decade.
And let us be clear, those are merely the fees to enter the primary contest, before a single rally is held, or a single campaign message is broadcast.
A credible run for the presidency, by the time it reaches a general election, demands in the region of US$1OO million,” he pointed out.
He said the escalation of the figures was not random but the product of a structural transformation in how political competition in Ghana and across the continent was now organised.
“They are what the system now routinely requires. And when a system routinely requires this much of those who would enter it, it is no longer selecting leaders based on conviction, competence or public trust. It is selecting based on capital,” he said.
Prof. Prempeh explained that the financialisation of politics was, at its core, a political economy problem.
He said it described a condition in which the logic of market exchange had migrated into the practice of democratic competition.
“When this migration happens, political participation is no longer organised primarily around the aggregation of citizen interests and the contest between ideas about how to govern a country well. It is organised around the mobilisation, deployment and the subsequent recovery of financial resources,” he said.
Financial network
Prof. Prempeh said candidates were assessed not by the depth of their policy thinking but by the breadth of their financial networks, stressing that “political parties cease to function as platforms for translating citizen preferences into government policy.
“They become, instead, machines for distributing resources to those who can deliver electoral outcomes and then recouping those resources once the state is within reach,” he added.
He said CDD-Ghana was founded on the conviction that democracy was not a gift bestowed by institutions, but a practice built by citizens who were genuinely empowered to participate in the decisions that shape their lives.
He said the mission of CDD-Ghana was to promote and deepen democracy, good governance and inclusive development, which had driven the organisation to generate research and analysis and pursue advocacy to promote electoral integrity, fairness and fight political corruption.
