By Jimmy Aglah
In a certain Ghanaian town, two football clubs quarrelled over the appointment of a referee. The lady chosen was an accomplished professional who had recently travelled with one team, explained its tactics and encouraged supporters to believe in victory. The club chairman dismissed the protests: the referee had never possessed an official membership card. Surely the spectators could now go home satisfied. What more convincing evidence of neutrality could anyone demand?
If this sounds like village comedy, replace football with elections and the pitch with Ghana. On 12 October, President John Dramani Mahama swore in Emelia Afi Agbenyo as Deputy Chairperson of the Electoral Commission, alongside Dr Joseph Kwaku Asamoah. He urged them to serve without favour. Excellent advice. Unfortunately, Ghana, that hardworking factory of political contradictions, has noticed a complication in the packaging.
In August 2024, the NDC officially listed Agbenyo among the spokespersons for the governance section of its election manifesto. This is documentary evidence, not WhatsApp archaeology. Presidential staffer Beatrice Annan explains that Agbenyo has never been a card-bearing NDC member and that her campaign engagement reflected longstanding advocacy for women’s representation. Her explanation and Agbenyo’s professional credentials deserve consideration. But the public may still reasonably ask whether speaking for a party’s election manifesto creates an appearance of political affinity.
The membership card has apparently become Ghana’s newest miracle-working object. You may carry a party’s microphone, explain its promises and help persuade the electorate, but if no card emerges from your handbag, every hint of association vanishes. The mouth that has tasted pepper may now swear the tongue knows nothing of heat. Perhaps our political scientists should stop studying institutions and begin studying handbags.
The NPP has greeted the appointment with thunder. Its communications director, Dennis Miracles Aboagye, questions the wisdom of placing a former NDC manifesto spokesperson in electoral leadership. It is a question worth asking. But memory, that inconvenient village elder, has arrived carrying a stool from 2023. Under President Akufo-Addo, appointments of Peter Appiahene and Salima Ahmed Tijani to the Commission provoked objections over alleged NPP affiliations. CODEO and other civil society organisations warned that even the appearance of partisanship could damage public confidence. Their protest did not produce the resignations they sought.
The NDC now offers a familiar defence. Rashid Tanko-Computer recalls how concerns about earlier appointments were dismissed. But when your neighbour’s goat destroys your cassava, you do not repair the injustice by releasing yours into his maize. Two farms ruined do not make a bumper harvest. If the previous government set a poor example, why must its successor treat the mistake as an heirloom?
Let us be fair to Agbenyo. Earlier advocacy does not establish future dishonesty. A citizen can publicly support particular policies and later perform a national duty impartially. Equally, a fine curriculum vitae cannot by itself settle questions of public trust. The Electoral Commission is not a family funeral committee where the chairman may award his cousins the best seats. It administers elections whose losers must trust the arithmetic as much as the winners.
Our Constitution allows the President, acting on the advice of the Council of State, to appoint the Commission’s leadership while requiring the institution to remain independent. There lies the puzzle: the political executive helps select the referee and then asks the crowd to forget who handed over the whistle. Proposals for a more transparent appointment process already exist. Why prefer elaborate assurances to stronger safeguards?
Perhaps the real scandal is not the appointment itself but our national talent for manufacturing principles that expire whenever governments change. In opposition, politicians become fierce defenders of institutional independence, quoting the Constitution with the solemnity of a chief priest consulting the oracle. Once in government, yesterday’s outrage mysteriously becomes today’s administrative wisdom. The same mouths change their sermons without changing their congregations. As our elders warn, the crab cannot give birth to a bird. Yet Ghanaian politics has perfected the art of laying political eggs and announcing that the chicks are completely independent of their parents.
Agbenyo deserves the opportunity to demonstrate impartiality through her conduct. But Ghana deserves something greater than assurances that the referee will behave. We deserve institutions whose credibility does not depend on which political party last occupied Jubilee House. For when citizens begin to suspect the referee before the match has even started, every whistle becomes a controversy, every decision a conspiracy and every defeat a potential national crisis.
And therein lies the question our politicians would rather we did not ask: *If the NDC and NPP can recognise the dangers of partisan appointments so clearly when they are in opposition, why do those dangers suddenly disappear when they enter government?*
Perhaps the answer is painfully simple. In Ghana, we do not appear to object to the referee wearing party colours. We object only when the colours are not our own.