Last Thursday, the Attorney General and Minister for Justice, Dr Dominic Ayine, held a press briefing in Accra to announce government’s position on the recommendations of the Constitution Review Committee (CRC), chaired by Professor H. Kwasi Prempeh. The committee had submitted 206 proposed amendments to the 1992 Constitution: 147 revisions to existing provisions and 59 entirely new ones.
Government has accepted several of the headline proposals. Presidential and Parliamentary terms would move from four years to five, with the two term limit retained. The minimum age to contest the presidency would fall to 35. Cabinet size would be capped at around 60 ministers, and Parliament at 300 seats, made up of the existing 276 constituency seats plus 24 new ones.
The death penalty would be abolished for life imprisonment. Dual citizens by birth would be allowed to contest parliamentary seats. The Office of the Attorney General would be separated from the Ministry of Justice, and the district level Chief Executives would be directly elected. Dr Ayine said the two amendment bills are expected by October 2026, with a referendum planned alongside the 2027 District Assembly elections to reduce costs.
The Chronicle says ‘Ayekoo’ to the committee for the work put into this report, one of the most ambitious attempts to overhaul Ghana’s governance architecture since 1992. But what the government announced on Thursday is its own selection from the CRC’s report, not the report itself. The government picked what suited its agenda and set the rest aside, most notably the committee’s proposal for a long term national development plan, constitutionally entrenched and binding on every government that follows.
Government liked the idea of a rolling, multi-year plan, but balked at binding it into law, calling that a “command model” tying the hands of future administrations. Is that really the concern, or is it simply that no government wants to be held to promises it cannot keep? Ghana’s problem has never been plans that bind too tightly. It has been governments abandoning their predecessors’ programmes the moment power changes hands, and starting all over again at the taxpayer’s expense.
Two of the accepted proposals trouble us most. The extension of presidential and parliamentary terms is defended on efficiency grounds, that four years leaves too little room to govern once transition and campaigning are accounted for. That may well be true, but let us not pretend this is a neutral technical fix.
It is incumbents extending their own time in office, and they are the ones deciding it. Why must it always be more years, more seats, more allowances for the political class, while the ordinary Ghanaian struggles from paycheck to paycheck?
Then there is dual citizenship. We have argued before that opening Parliament to dual citizens raises real questions of allegiance and trust that government has not adequately answered.
On separation of powers, The Chronicle believes the picture is mixed. The CRC wanted a clean break, barring MPs from doubling as ministers. Government watered that down, allowing appointments from inside or outside Parliament and simply nudged the ministerial ceiling upward.
On the judiciary, government moved further, accepting a fixed non renewable 10 year term for the Chief Justice, capped at retirement age 70, and a Supreme Court membership of 19 justices rather than the 15 that the committee proposed, a genuine reform, though one that sits oddly beside a stated goal of efficiency and cost control.
On anti-corruption, the picture is murkier still. The CRC called for strengthening anti corruption institutions and clarifying the Attorney General’s prosecution powers. Yet the Supreme Court ruled only days before the briefing that the Attorney General retains power to discontinue prosecutions brought by the Office of the Special Prosecutor, the very body meant to pursue corruption independently of political control. If a political Attorney General can still halt the Special Prosecutor’s cases, it is hard to see how the CRC’s goal has truly been served.
We do not write off these reforms entirely. Abolishing the death penalty, electing MMDCEs directly, and capping the size of the executive and legislature are genuine, welcome steps. But a package chosen by the executive, put before voters on a timetable the executive controls, is not automatically in the public interest, just because an independent committee started the conversation.
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