The Executive Director of the Center for Democratic Development (CDD-Ghana), Professor Henry Kwasi Prempeh, has expressed disapproval of the Electoral Commission’s (EC) decision to approve 13 candidates for the upcoming 2024 presidential election.

He made the remarks during a lecture commemorating the late legal luminary Akoto Ampaw, where he questioned the integrity of the electoral process and suggested that certain candidates may not be entirely genuine contenders but proxies of the New Patriotic Party (NPP) and National Democratic Congress (NDC).

The Electoral Commission, in September 2024, announced that 13 out of 24 applicants had successfully been vetted and cleared to run in the December 7 presidential polls.

Speaking at the First Anniversary Lecture in honour of Akoto Ampaw, Professor Prempeh did not mince words in expressing his concerns.

He argued that many of the smaller political parties, which have been cleared to contest, are effectively acting as proxies for both the NPP and the NDC.

Prof. Prempeh went further to critique the role of the Electoral Commission, asserting that if the EC were more diligent and scrupulous in its vetting process, the number of candidates on the ballot would likely be much smaller.

“We operate a duopolistic political system in a highly polarised winner-takes-all political culture and so how does exit look like in that kind of context? Exit occurs in a variety of ways. Dissatisfied voters can switch between parties but ours being duopolistic, it means that the choice is, practically speaking, there are 13 or so people on the ballot and I think if the Electoral Commission was more diligent and scrupulous, there would be fewer and one will wonder why we keep having the numbers that we have on the ballot every election year when most of these political parties do not meet the requirements. But there is folklore about why it is that way.

“It is basically because they are proxies of one of these two political parties for the purpose of influencing decision-making at the Inter-Party Advisory Committee (IPAC).”