The Minority Leader, Alexander Afenyo-Markin, has proposed five reforms to restructure the National Development Planning Commission (NDPC) to ensure continuity of long-term development strategies.
He said implementing those reforms would shield the commission against overt partisan capture and stop the practice in which electoral manifestos effectively served as the primary blueprint for national direction, causing policy discontinuity, unsustainable development and weakened institutional credibility.
“When planning authority rests on professional credibility, continuity becomes intellectually defensible rather than politically imposed,” he said.
He named the reforms as reconstituting the NDPC around technical competence, subjecting the appointments of the chair and core technical members to supermajority approval in Parliament and requiring Ghana’s development framework to carry structured continuity obligations.
NDPC’s authority
Mr Afenyo-Markin made the proposals when he delivered a public lecture in Parliament last Thursday.
The lecture, titled “Centre left, centre right, formulating policies that serve a growing democracy”, formed Parliament’s sustained commitment to deepen its relationship with the people and to create accessible platforms for dialogue on issues that shape our national development.
The lecture focused on youth unemployment, the alarming impact of galamsey, youth migration, the Free Senior High School policy, and the reduction in cocoa prices.
Technical competence
Mr Afenyo-Markin said if we fail to reform planning institutions, ideological contestation would continue to produce policy oscillation.
“If we succeed, centre-left or centre-right governments alike will operate within a stable national framework, differing in ideology but united in the trajectory of sustainable national development,” he said.
Strengthening legitimacy
The Minority Leader said at present, perceptions of political alignment undermined confidence in the NDPC’s neutrality.
He said a structured commission should prioritise technical expertise across critical domains, including macroeconomics, public finance, infrastructure engineering, education policy, agriculture, transformation, digital systems, environmental sustainability and industrial strategy.
He submitted that to strengthen legitimacy, appointments to the NDPC, particularly its chair and core technical members, should require supermajority approval in Parliament.
Continuity obligations
On binding medium- to long-term developmental frameworks, Mr Afenyo-Markin said Ghana’s development framework should include structured continuity obligations.
That, he said, did not mean future governments could not innovate, but they must justify deviation transparently within an agreed long-term architecture.
“Development requires time and time requires stability for development to manifest,” he said.
Fiscal responsibility
On fiscal responsibility being embedded within development planning, he said one of the recurring disruptions in Ghana’s developmental trajectory had been macroeconomic instability.
Planning, he said, could not be divorced from fiscal realism, which is why the NDPC framework should integrate binding fiscal rules, debt sustainability thresholds, expenditure discipline parameters, and medium-term revenue mobilisation strategies into the development architecture.
“Industrial ambition without debt discipline creates vulnerability and,therefore, development planning must internalise macroeconomic constraints from inception.
Continuity audits
With regard to institutionalisation of policy impact evaluation and continuity audits, he submitted that a reformed NDPC must not merely design plans.
He said the commission must evaluate the plans through rigorous, independent policy impact assessments at defined intervals.
In his view, when administrations changed, structured continuity audits should assess which projects were near completion, economically viable and strategically essential to national development.
“Projects that meet objective criteria should continue irrespective of political origin and this should operationalise Article 35 directive regarding continuity of public projects and project national investment from partisan resets.
Source:
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