2008, the year of politics?

Is 2008 the year of politics? I think I have had politics on the 'membrane' the whole year...Ken Livingstone losing the ‘Mayorship’ of London (whilst I was still resident there), the difficult decision of should I support Hillary Clinton because she is female or Barack Obama because he is black (even though I have no vote in America), I observed the shambles of the Kenyan and Zimbabwean elections and looked forward to the Ghanaian elections. Earlier this year I queued for 5 hours to register to vote and on the 7th of December queued for 6 hours to cast my vote. Now that a run off has been declared between the incumbent and the opposition parties I guess I am going to have to queue all over again.

I have a strong belief in representational politics and standpoint theory – the belief that if you are from a particular standpoint you are more likely to be able to emphatise with someone from a similar standpoint. At least that’s my laywoman’s understanding of standpoint theory, so women politicians for example are more likely to vote in a Domestic Relations Bill and Oil investors in the US are more likely to vote Republican. I am aware of the limits of representational politics so I do not need a dreadlocked, middle class Ghanaian woman, aged 30 to speak up for women’s rights in Ghana but I do need a significant number of women parliamentarians in Ghana. Alas, it appears that I am to have less women parliamentarians in the next Ghanaian parliament than the previous one.

According to the Daily Graphic of December 11, 2008, 103 women contested the parliamentary elections (In 2004, 104 contested) but so far only 5 new women parliamentary candidates have emerged victorious. 4 of them on the ticket of the New Patriotic Party and 1 on the ticket of the Convention People’s Party, the issue this raises for me is do political parties select female candidates to run in their ‘strongholds’. It is well known that some areas of Ghana are strongholds of particular parties so in my local constituency of Tema West the NPP is almost guaranteed victory no matter who they select to represent the party hence Ms Irene Naa Torshie Addo winning on the NPP’s ticket. Personally, I doubt very much if ‘Naa’ won on the basis of her vision for the area.

If Ghana is to have more women MPs then political parties need to take the issue of gender parity seriously. What has worked in other parts of the world (the Nordic countries come to mind) has been a quota system for women. I would suggest that Ghanaian political parties adopt a similar strategy and have ‘women only lists’ for a proportion of their ‘strongholds’. This will indicate that political parties are taking the issue of gender parity seriously and will be one sure way of getting more women MPs. The next Ghanaian parliament is going to have 18 women MPs out of 230. I think that’s abhorrent. What are your thoughts?

Nana Sekyiamah
Programme Officer
Fundraising & Communications