Minister for Communications Ursula Owusu-Ekuful is calling for radical change in the political status quo and composition of a Parliament representative of the nation’s population.
Parliament, she said, should look like Ghana in terms of the number of women and men in the House.
She said, “Parliament should look like Ghana does with an almost equal representation of men and women in our population; our House should also look the same.”
The Minister made the call on Friday during an interview on International Women’s Day. She earlier made a statement in the Chamber of Parliament to commemorate the day, which fell on Wednesday 8th March 2023.
She lamented that Ghana prides herself as the leader on the continent in everything but with regard to women’s participation in decision-making, the country is lagging very far behind her peers in East and Southern Africa.
According to her, something different should be done about how political parties organize their international elections, and called on the two largest political parties, the New Patriotic Party (NPP) and the National Democratic Congress (NDC) to revisit the conversation of women in politics.
The Minister disclosed that in 2012 she led an affirmative action initiative in the NPP that advocated for women to be allowed to contest unopposed.
“If there are no contests with men but allow women to contest women across both the political divide, no matter who wins that seat it will still be a woman representative.”
“We need to revisit some of those initiatives; and now that we are entering the primary season, I think we have even left it too late to start this conversation about what we can do to increase the levels of female participation in our governance.”
“It is an indictment on us as a country that after so many years of independence, we still have very few women in decision-making in our country.”
Mrs. Ursula noted that addressing this situation starts from the primary selection process and averred that if the two largest political parties decide this time around they would do something differently, the 9th Parliament would definitely be different.
According to her, slashing the filing fees for women is not enough because, despite the fact this has occurred over a number of parliamentary primaries, it has failed to improve the levels beyond 10% hence something different and drastic needs to be done.
Currently, women comprise just 14.5% of the total members of Ghana’s Parliament.