Letter to President John Dramani Mahama on Completing the Republic
To His Excellency John Dramani Mahama
President of the Republic of Ghana
Jubilee House
Accra, Ghana
Subject: An Appeal to Complete the Republic by Aligning Chieftaincy with Constitutional Government
Your Excellency,
Senior Brother, I take the liberty of addressing you at a moment which, in the life of a nation, does not come often. Ghana stands before one of those constitutional questions by which the future judges the courage of the present. The matter before you is not merely whether the chieftaincy institution should be given a greater place in governance. It is whether Ghana shall continue to be a Republic in form while tolerating a divided structure of authority in fact, or whether it shall now summon the wisdom to become a Republic in substance.
No Constitution, however admirable in its language, can save a people from the consequences of ambiguity in power. A Constitution may establish Parliament, the Executive, the Judiciary, district assemblies, and the organs of local administration. But if, beneath and beside these organs, there continues another chain of authority founded upon inheritance rather than citizenship, upon custom rather than accountable law, and upon informal influence rather than defined public duty, the Republic will possess the appearance of unity without the reality of it.
This is the danger which Ghana must now confront. I do not say that tradition is an evil. I do not say that chieftaincy has no dignity. I do not say that the stool, the skin, the palace, the festival, or the memory of the ancestors must be cast aside. What I do say is that culture may be honoured, but authority must be made accountable. A modern State cannot prosper when the citizen is uncertain whether his rights are to be vindicated before the court, the assembly, the district office, or the chief. Where authority is uncertain, responsibility is evaded. Where responsibility is evaded, corruption finds shelter. Where corruption finds shelter, development becomes a promise repeated from one election to another, but never made durable.
Ghana has the name of a Republic. It has the instruments of a Republic. It has the memory of a people who have struggled to govern themselves. Yet it also has a parallel governance architecture which no serious modern nation can indefinitely sustain. The question, therefore, is not whether Ghana should abolish tradition. That is a false question. The true question is whether Ghana shall permit tradition to continue as a rival source of administrative, fiscal, and allocative authority, or whether it shall constitutionalize tradition within a single national order.
In my judgment, the proper course is clear. Ghana must preserve the dignity of chieftaincy while ending the duplication of governance. It must distinguish, with firmness and fairness, between cultural legitimacy and executive authority. The former may remain with traditional institutions. The latter must belong only to the constitutional State.
The tribal monarchs of Ghana – Asantehene, Naa Yaa, Ga Mantse, etc – whose names carry the weight of memory and identity among great peoples, should be recognized constitutionally as national cultural sovereigns and senior statesmen. Their function should be moral, cultural, and advisory. They should serve as custodians of civilizational memory and as guardians of social cohesion. But they should not exercise executive authority, fiscal discretion, or land allocation powers. Their elevation must be elevation within order, not enlargement of ambiguity.
The paramount chiefs, too, should retain dignity, ceremony, cultural leadership, and a defined advisory place in the Republic. They may preserve heritage, guide festivals, assist in reconciliation, and bring the wisdom of place and people to national deliberation. But they must cease to function as shadow executives in districts, intermediaries in public finance, or allocators of land. Land, being the economic foundation of citizenship and development, cannot remain subject to discretionary hereditary control. It must be governed through accountable public institutions, such as Regional Land Trusts, under law, record, transparency, and review.
The largest and most difficult question concerns the sub-chief system. Here Your Excellency must not be misled by the comfort of sentiment. Sentiment has its place in private affection; it is a dangerous guide in constitutional design. A nation cannot maintain more than ten thousand inherited offices exercising uncertain authority over local life and at the same time build a professional system of village, town, city, district, and regional administration. This is not coexistence. It is confusion organized by history.
If sub-chiefs serve a cultural purpose, let that purpose be retained as cultural custodianship. If they possess gifts of mediation, let those gifts be incorporated into community mediation panels operating under statute and subordinate to the courts. If they possess genuine capacity for leadership, let them seek office through election, qualification, or professional appointment in the local government system. But what cannot be defended is the continuation of inherited local authority which is neither fully ceremonial nor fully constitutional, neither judicial nor administrative, neither private nor public, but powerful enough to affect the lives of citizens without being accountable to them.
Your Excellency, the present generation has no moral right to transmit institutional confusion to succeeding generations. Each generation may bind itself by its own judgment, but it must not imprison posterity inside the defects it lacked the courage to correct. Ghana’s youth will not be served by a republic in which power is scattered between birthright and citizenship. Investors will not be secured by a land system in which title, custom, discretion, and political influence overlap. Communities will not be developed by a local order in which the assembly, the chief, the court, and the informal authority all speak at once and none is wholly responsible.
I therefore urge that the constitutional reform now before the nation should establish a Senior House as the bridge between tradition and the modern State. This body should replace the present duplication of the Council of State, the National House of Chiefs, and the Regional Houses of Chiefs with one coherent advisory institution of national consequence. It should not be a rival Parliament. It should not be a hereditary chamber. It should not be a ceremonial museum of titles. It should be a chamber of institutional memory, technical competence, regional insight, and sober constitutional advice.
There are indeed those who will suggest that we simply allot seats in our current Parliament to chiefs and various interests groups. That will be a mistake in our social organization that will only layer on a sendiment of confusion for the future.
A parliamentarian derives authority from the consent of the governed — the vote, the contestation, the accountability of the ballot. A chief derives authority from birth, lineage, custom, and ancestral succession. These are not complementary sources of power. They are philosophically incompatible. To seat them side by side and call it one legislature is not inclusion — it is constitutional confusion dressed in the language of cultural pride.
I have seen this confusion before. India made the mistake of allowing traditional and hereditary structures to persist inside the architecture of a modern republic — and we spent decades untangling the contradictions. Do not repeat our error.
A parliamentarian can be voted out. A chief cannot. The moment you give a chief a legislative seat, you have created a class of lawmaker who is structurally unremovable by the people whose laws he makes. This is not bicameralism. This is aristocracy wearing a democratic costume.
Accountability is not a procedural nicety, it is the moral core of representative government. Without it, you do not have a parliament. You have a durbar with a microphone.
Chiefs already hold authority — customary, land, ritual, social. That authority is real. But it is bounded. The moment you bring that authority into parliament without surgical clarity about its scope, you do not expand the chief’s legitimacy. You contaminate both institutions. Parliament will be pulled toward customary pressures it was never designed to adjudicate. And chieftaincy — which commands genuine moral authority in community life — will be politicized, factionalized, and eventually hollowed out by the partisan machinery of the legislature.
You will have weakened both in trying to honor both.
Whom does a chief represent? His stool. His skin. His lineage’s people. But constituencies in a modern republic are geographical and civic — they cut across ethnic lines, across chieftaincies, across traditional jurisdictions. Who does the Asantehene represent in parliament? Only Asantes? All Ghanaians? Neither answer is clean. And an unclean answer in constitutional law is not a nuance — it is a crack in the foundation.
Let me be direct about what I am most afraid of.
Traditional hierarchies — however culturally rich — are hierarchies nonetheless. They encode precedence, lineage, and inherited rank. The whole project of constitutional democracy is to build a counter-system — one where the son of a farmer has the same legislative standing as the son of a king.
When you allot seats to chiefs by virtue of their chieftaincy, you are not merely giving them a platform. You are embedding the logic of inherited rank into the constitution itself. You are telling every Ghanaian citizen: some voices in this legislature arrived here by blood, not by your vote. That is not a ceremonial concession. That is a philosophical retreat.
If Ghana wishes to draw on the wisdom of traditional authorities — and there is genuine wisdom there — then create a separate, advisory, constitutionally-defined body which I am suggesting it be called The Senior House.
The German Bundesrat did not confuse aristocratic tradition with federal representation. The British House of Lords — itself a cautionary tale — has spent a century trying to justify hereditary lawmakers in a democratic age, and still has not resolved the contradiction. Finally, they got rid of hereditary lawmakers.
Ghana does not need to import that confusion. It is a young republic with the rare gift of building its institutions while still watching others fail.
And here is where I must speak most plainly, my senior brother, about corruption. We often treat corruption as a problem of individual morality: a bad man steals, a weak man takes a bribe. But corruption is structural before it is personal. It flourishes wherever a society privately accepts that some people are entitled to resources, positions, and power that others must earn through merit and struggle. When you enshrine hereditary succession into your governance — when you say, in your constitution, that this seat belongs to this lineage, you do not merely create an unfair legislature. You transmit a moral instruction to every Ghanaian citizen: that in this republic, who you are born to matters more than what you can do or who you choose to become. And from that instruction, corruption draws its deepest nourishment.
For if the son of a chief need not compete, need not prove, need not be accountable, then why should the civil servant not favor his nephew? Why should the minister not protect his clan? You cannot preach integrity in the offices of government while practicing hereditary privilege in the chambers of the legislature. The two cannot coexist. One will always justify the other. Corruption is not simply greed, it is hereditary thinking applied informally, by people who learned from the state itself that blood is a legitimate currency of power. If Ghana’s constitution quietly tells the sons of lineage that they are pre-qualified for authority, it simultaneously tells the sons of farmers, teachers, and traders that the state was never fully theirs to serve — and that exclusion is where the rot begins. A nation cannot simultaneously declare all citizens equal before the law and then reserve seats of lawmaking for those equal by birth. That contradiction does not stay in the parliament chamber. It seeps into every institution, every procurement decision, every courtroom — until the entire republic operates on the informal understanding that entitlement is real, that hierarchy is destiny, and that merit was always the story told to those who were never meant to win.
The Senior House should include senior traditional leaders, including selected paramount chiefs and queen mothers, but membership must not be automatic by virtue of stool or skin. Hereditary status may qualify a person to be considered; it must not be sufficient to command membership. The Republic must insist upon service, integrity, and demonstrated contribution. In this way, traditional authority is not insulted. It is disciplined by merit.
The Senior House should also include national experts in law, economics, engineering, public health, technology, environmental science, national security, agriculture, and other fields upon which the survival of the modern State depends. A republic that thinks only in four-year cycles cannot solve problems that mature over decades. Pensions, water security, climate adaptation, digital regulation, health systems, energy security, and industrial development all require a forum where knowledge is not sacrificed to electoral urgency.
Regional ministers, as the President’s representatives in the regions, may also sit in this chamber during their terms of office so that national counsel is not detached from local realities. The North has its own developmental urgencies; the coast has its own ecological anxieties; mining areas have their own scars; urban Ghana has its own congestion; agricultural districts have their own needs. A wise advisory chamber must hear all these voices, but hear them within one Republic.
The Senior House should advise the Presidency and Parliament on long-term national development, review major legislative proposals, examine the regional balance and fiscal sustainability of public programmes, and issue public advisory reports on major national projects. It should be able to warn before failure becomes scandal, before cost overruns become normal, before corruption becomes irreversible, and before policy becomes a hostage of party advantage. Its power should not be executive. Its authority should be the authority of reason, evidence, experience, and public legitimacy.
This arrangement accomplishes a necessary constitutional settlement. It gives traditional authority a home inside the Republic instead of allowing it to operate beside the Republic. It preserves dignity without preserving duplication. It gives chiefs a national role without making them local executives. It creates a place for wisdom without surrendering the principle that sovereignty belongs to the people.
There will be those who say that such reform is too bold. There will be those who say that it offends custom. There will be those who mistake inherited privilege for culture and administrative confusion for continuity. To them the answer must be plain: no nation can be grateful to its ancestors at the cost of its future. Reverence for the past is noble when it strengthens the living. It becomes servitude when it prevents a people from organizing their common life according to reason, equality, and accountability.
Nor should this reform be pursued in a spirit of hostility. A Constitution must not humiliate institutions which it seeks to transform. The tribal monarchs and paramount chiefs should be invited to lead this transition, not because the Republic is subordinate to them, but because their cooperation can make reform peaceful, dignified, and durable. The wise chief will understand that the age of ambiguous power is passing. The institution that survives will be the institution that accepts definition. The authority that remains respected will be the authority that accepts limits.
Your Excellency, Ghana now has before it an opportunity to move from electoral democracy to developmental democracy, from constitutional form to constitutional fact, from inherited ambiguity to republican coherence. If this opportunity is missed, the country may continue to hold elections, change governments, and produce plans, yet still find itself arrested by the old contradiction of a State that cannot speak with one voice at the local level.
A Constitution is not merely a legal document. It is a moral decision about how a people shall live together. If Ghana decides that citizenship must be the foundation of authority, then all public power must be traceable to law, election, appointment, qualification, and review. If Ghana decides that tradition must be preserved, then tradition must be placed where it can dignify the nation without dividing the State. If Ghana decides that development must be more than aspiration, then it must build institutions that reward merit, clarify responsibility, secure land, reduce corruption, and bind public authority to public accountability.
This is the meaning of completing the Republic.
I therefore respectfully appeal to you to seize this moment. Let Ghana not merely adjust chieftaincy. Let Ghana settle the constitutional question of traditional authority for the next century. Let the tribal monarchs become constitutional cultural anchors. Let paramount chiefs find honourable national and regional advisory roles. Let sub-chief governance be dissolved as a parallel administrative tier, while opening pathways for genuine community leaders to serve through election, qualification, and law. Let land be governed by transparent trusts and public institutions. Let mediation be useful, but subordinate to the courts. Let local administration be professional, accountable, and singular.
If this is done, Ghana will not have abolished tradition. It will have rescued tradition from the burden of governing where it cannot be accountable. It will not have weakened the Republic. It will have made the Republic real. It will not have dishonoured the ancestors. It will have honoured them by refusing to leave their descendants a State divided against itself.
History will not ask whether the reform was easy. It will ask whether, when the contradiction was plain and the opportunity was present, those entrusted with power had the courage to act. May Your Excellency choose the path of courage. May Ghana become a Republic not merely proclaimed, but completed.
Respectfully submitted,
Mr. Hene Aku Kwapong, PhD
Founder, NBOSI (National Blue Ocean Strategy Insitute), a CDD Ghana Fellow, Ecobank Ghana Board Member, and former Head of Management for Royal Bank of Scotland EMEA Credit Markets. He is a graduate of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Columbia University. He writes the “Re-Imagine Ghana” column for the B&FT.
