On 31 January, 211,849 accredited NPP delegates voted at 333 centres, and Dr Mahamudu Bawumia took about 57% percent. It was, fairly enough, the largest primary the party had ever run. But Ghana has over 17 million registered voters. Against that, 211,849 is a rounding error, and on 29 July the Supreme Court said as much. I should say where I stand. I thought the delegate system indefensible long before the court said so. What I am not sure about is whether one member, one vote will be better, or just a costlier version of the same disease.
What the court decided
By five votes to two, a panel chaired by Chief Justice Paul Baffoe-Bonnie ruled that parties can no longer use a delegate college to pick presidential and parliamentary candidates. The case was brought by Professor Kwabena Frimpong-Boateng, Dr Nyaho Nyaho-Tamakloe and Dr Christine Amoako-Nuamah, and the Attorney-General came in on their side, which tells you how few friends delegates had left. Every member in good standing must now be allowed to vote, with good standing, the Court said, for the party to decide. Parties have twelve months. Anything settled under the old rules stands, so Bawumia stays the candidate.
The peg is Article 55(5), which says a party’s internal organisation must follow democratic principles. The Chief Justice’s point was practical. When the power to choose candidates sits with a small group, you have built a market that money can move easily. He’s right. My question is what happens once you make that market forty times larger.
The NPP has moved first. A memorandum of 31 August from General Secretary Justin Kodua Frimpong sent amendment proposals to the secretariats. Frank Davies chairs the committee turning them into motions. Delegates gather in Kumasi on 3 October.
Why the delegate system had to go By 2015 both major parties were picking parliamentary candidates through constituency colleges of around 500 delegates. A seat in Parliament could be won by convincing a few hundred people in a hall, and everybody knows what convincing meant. Votes were expensive, and the highest bidder took them all. Delegates became a class of their own, with a going rate, while constituency executives learned to look upwards, to whoever appointed and financed them, rather than down to the members. We started calling it a monetocracy. An ugly word for an ugly arrangement, and nobody in either party has argued with it.
So the case for one member, one vote is a real one. It hands the party back to the people who buy the T-shirts and sit through the branch meetings. A candidate carried by eight thousand members can claim something one carried by four hundred cannot, and for a young aspirant with a good message and no godfather, a bigger electorate is a bigger door.
The stronger argument is about where power settles over time. An MP facing eight thousand members instead of four hundred delegates cannot treat the branches as scenery between elections, and the organiser who can turn out a ward matters more than the executive who can be quietly settled. Parties would finally have a reason to keep real branches and know their members. A messy first cycle may be a fair price for that.
I would like all of it to be true. We have tested it.
The NDC ran this experiment In 2014 the NDC opened its presidential primary to every card-bearing member, an initiative Asiedu Nketiah still claims as his. In the parliamentary primaries that followed, more than 1.2 million people voted, ten times the old delegate numbers. Researchers writing in African Affairs later asked aspirants and MPs what it had done to the cost of standing. A good number said the primaries got more expensive, and blamed the expansion. The party dropped it after the 2016 defeat.
The pattern is not just ours. In 2022 about 140,000 Conservative members in Britain chose a prime minister who lasted seven weeks. Nobody called that undemocratic. The complaint was that too few had made too big a decision, which is our complaint about delegates, turned around. In America, the primaries opened up after 1968 and the party bosses lost their grip, at which point money and celebrity moved into the space.
A bigger electorate changes what the money buys. Buying votes one by one may get too expensive across eight thousand members, which sounds like progress until you ask what replaces it. Paid organisers, transport, airtime, mobile money, voter data, a campaign that never stops. All of it belongs to people who already have money: ministers, incumbents and businessmen with an interest in who sits in Parliament.
A mass electorate also rewards recognition over record. The aspirant with a radio slot and a TikTok following starts well ahead of the one who has spent ten years on constituency work, and rumour travels through Ghanaian WhatsApp faster than any correction.
Who counts as a member?
This is the question the judgment leaves open, and everything depends on it. Evans Nimako of the NPP raised it within hours. Neither party holds an audited membership roll, dues collection is patchy, and there is no agreed test of good standing. Nothing stops a citizen holding cards for two parties, and nothing checks one register against the other.
Picture an aspirant with money and six months to a primary. Chasing eight thousand votes is expensive. Recruiting two thousand members is not, and it happens long before anyone is watching. Fresh registrations in a stronghold, dues settled in bulk, and the contest is over before campaigning starts. The fight in our parties is about to move from who counts as a delegate to who counts as a voter, and it will be an uglier one, because it happens in an office rather than at a polling station and leaves almost no evidence.
Which brings me back to Kumasi. The court told the NPP to open its primaries but left it to say who its members are, and that is where the real discretion sits. A conference of delegates will now write the rule deciding how much of their own influence they give away. In 2025 that same conference widened the college by about 40% percent while promising full one member, one vote later. Gradualism was the instinct then, and I would not bet against it now.
Somebody has to pay
Asiedu Nketiah puts the 2014 exercise at close to GH¢14 million, with over 8,000 polling stations and the bill carried by the party. He reckons a full primary would need one to two million ballot papers, against fewer than 400,000 under the delegate system, and he wants the state to pay. Nimako wants safeguards first. Gbande of the NDC calls it a financial and logistical challenge, and sounds lukewarm.
A reform meant to reduce the influence of money will cost far more money to run. Either the state pays, reopening a funding debate Ghana has ducked for twenty years, or the parties pay, and they will take it from whoever is offering.
The year we have
The deadline is July 2027, and the first draft lands in five weeks. If I held the pen, I would want four things. A membership register tied to the Ghana Card. Spending limits and disclosure for internal campaigns. A staggered calendar instead of one impossible polling day. And a dispute mechanism that keeps contested primaries out of the Supreme Court.
The court has spoken. The question is no longer legal. It is political and organisational. Is Ghana ready? For the principle, yes, and we have been for years. For the machinery, no, and machinery is where these things are won or lost. The court has taken away an excuse. We will have one member, one vote by next July. Whether we end up with internal democracy is another question, and it is being settled now, quietly, in the rooms where membership registers are kept.
Written By: Doris Nketia Badu
Deputy Secretary North London Chapter, NPP UK
General Secretary (Global) Bawumia Ladies
nanaabanketia@ymail.com
