Partisan appointments won’t help restore trust in EC – Osae-Kwapong

Appointing openly partisan figures to the Electoral Commission (EC)will not help rebuild public trust, CDD-Ghana Fellow Dr John Osae-Kwapong has warned.

Speaking on Joy News’ PM Express on Tuesday, he said such appointments deepen concerns about an institution already struggling to regain public confidence.

“So for an institution that is already struggling in the eyes of the public, you mentioned the Afrobarometer on the question of trust. I feel like this doesn't help to restore that kind of trust, that the institution itself really needs to build back up.”

His comments follow President John Mahama’s swearing-in of two new EC deputy chairpersons on Monday, October 12. They are Dr Joseph Kwaku Asamoah and Emelia Afi Agbenyo.

They fill vacancies left by Dr Bossman Eric Asare, who resigned, and Samuel Tettey, who retired. At the ceremony,

President Mahama urged the appointees to strengthen public confidence through impartiality, transparency and accountability.

Dr Osae-Kwapong placed the controversy within a recurring pattern involving both major political parties.

“Both parties - NDC and NPP - have had opportunities to express a view about openly partisan persons being appointed to certain institutions, but we see this cycle being repeated, through the rotation and election turnovers.”

He argued that changes in government had failed to break the practice. Instead, the cycle risked encouraging parties to fill independent constitutional bodies with their supporters whenever they gained power.

He illustrated the problem with a conversation he had with a partisan friend that afternoon.

“Her response to me was that this tells us that whenever we have the chance, we should pack independent Constitutional bodies with partisans,” he recounted.

For him, meaningful institutional reforms are needed to interrupt that cycle and address concerns about openly partisan appointments.

Dr Osae-Kwapong also drew a distinction between private political preferences and publicly known party affiliations. An appointee could privately support a party, he noted.

The public concern, however, becomes sharper when an openly partisan person joins an independent institution already facing questions about its credibility.

His central concern was the EC’s need to rebuild confidence. Appointments that raise fresh doubts about its independence, he argued, do little to support that task.

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