People enter politics for riches - Emile Short

A former boss of the Human Rights and Administrative Justice, Francis Emile Short, has condemned the practice of people getting into political office just to enrich themselves rather than serving the nation.

According to the former judge, the practice is so perverse and needs to be addressed in order to achieve the desired development for Africa.

“In Africa, too many people go into politics not to serve the people but to benefit themselves, to benefit the party and party supporters,” he told Kwabena Bobie Ansah on Accra100.5FM’s ‘The Citizen’ show on Tuesday, 10 September 2019.

He underscored how national interest reigns supreme in developed countries but the reverse is true in Africa.

Mr Short holds the opinion that the only time legislators from both aisles of Ghana’s Parliament unite is when it is in their collective interest.

Apart from such occasions, he said lawmakers from the governing New Patriotic Party (NPP) and the main opposition National Democratic Congress (NDC) do not agree on anything else.

Mr Short expressed concern that: “You hardly have consensus between these two dominant parties” but “the only time you would get consensus is when they introduce a policy that will benefit both Members of Parliament of the political divide”.

He attributed the development to the winner-takes-all phenomenon, which is characterised by the governing party assuming total control of everything after winning power.

In his view, “the winner-takes-all system is one of the greatest impediments to our democratic governance and we have to address that”.

Mr Short said: “Our politics is so adversarial; it is such that each party wants to unseat the other by fair or foul means because the stakes are very high”.