The Executive Director of Transparency International Ghana, Mary Awelana Addah, has welcomed the Supreme Court’s ruling on the delegate system, saying expanding the electoral college within political parties is a step in the right direction but cautioned that it will not, on its own, eliminate vote-buying.Speaking on JoyNews’ Newsfile on Saturday, August 1, Ms Addah said Ghana’s democracy has increasingly become vulnerable to money politics, making reforms to the delegate system necessary.“This is instructive and very important because since we started this experiment in 1993, we have seen incrementally that the democracy we are practising has become for sale to the highest bidder,” she said.While backing the Supreme Court’s decision, Ms Addah said that expanding the delegate base should not be viewed as a complete solution.“So, expanding the base is the right way to go, even though it is not a cure in itself,” she said.She said that Ghana’s two main political parties have already demonstrated through their own reforms that increasing the number of delegates promotes broader participation and makes vote-buying more difficult.Using the New Patriotic Party (NPP) as an example, she said the party’s delegate numbers had grown from just 1,998 in 1992 to more than 211,000 by 2026.She added that the National Democratic Congress (NDC) had followed a similar path, increasing its delegate base from 1,673 in 2008 to more than 350,000 eligible delegates by 2023.“It means that without a doubt, the parties also agree that expanding the base, apart from its inclusive agenda, also makes it very unattractive for anybody to borrow money or spend their inheritance just to pay people to vote for them.”According to her, Transparency International Ghana has spent years campaigning against vote-buying, warning that the problem has evolved into what she described as “vote-selling” as citizens seek direct benefits from politicians.“Over the years, in our work as anti-corruption campaigners, we have brought this subject to the Ghanaian populace. We started campaigns against vote-buying in 2004, which has incrementally increased to what we even call vote-selling now because citizens have seen that the benefits of development are not reaching them, so they also want to benefit when the time comes.”She said research by the Centre for Democratic Development (CDD-Ghana) had already highlighted the enormous financial cost of contesting presidential primaries, creating fertile ground for corruption.“The CDD research has shown the four million that is required for any presidential candidate to prosecute campaigns. We have seen increasingly, with impunity, that those who have the money are displaying wealth, buying people and paying amounts which they later justify because of weaknesses in the system.”She said the organisation has consistently advocated for vote-buying to be treated as a criminal offence, in line with international anti-corruption agreements.She pointed to Article 7 of the United Nations Convention against Corruption and the African Union Convention on Preventing and Combating Corruption, both of which encourage states to criminalise vote-buying and other electoral offences.“For us, we have been on this agenda advocating that vote-buying is criminal, vote-buying should be criminalised, and vote-buying should be cancelled. But we see that our politicians have been doing otherwise.”Ms Addah also highlighted Ghana’s role in supporting a United Nations resolution aimed at strengthening measures against corruption in political financing.She said Transparency International Ghana joined efforts in December to support a resolution tabled by Norway, which was eventually backed by more than 60 countries.“One of the things we called for, which was accepted, was recognition that campaign financing has become increasingly expensive across the globe and that many legal frameworks are not adequate to deal with it effectively.”However, she said that while reforms to political financing are necessary, she does not support the idea of the state fully funding political parties.“I am totally not for the state funding political parties fully,” she said.