A legal scholar and governance advocate, Professor Stephen Kwaku Asare, popularly known as Kwaku Azar, has called for stronger public institutions to reduce citizens’ reliance on personal relationships with politicians in accessing opportunities and public services.
According to him, Ghana’s governance system has created an environment where access to jobs, scholarships, contracts, promotions and other public services often appears to depend on political connections rather than transparent and merit-based processes.
His comments come after former Supreme Court Justice William Atuguba recently said that some politicians who were close to him during the 2024 general elections no longer answer his calls.
In a Facebook post on Saturday, July 18, 2026, Kwaku Azar said Justice Atuguba’s experience reflects a broader governance challenge rather than simply politicians abandoning their associates after elections.
“The larger problem is not that every political relationship fails to survive an election. It is that our system of governance encourages people to believe that personal access to politicians is necessary for navigating public life,” he wrote.
He argued that too many aspects of public life, including school admissions, employment, scholarships, contracts, appointments, promotions, and even access to some public services, appear to depend on “whom one knows.”
“That is the soil in which cronyism and nepotism grow,” he said, describing the situation as “Familiar Family and Friends Governance.”
Kwaku Azar noted that while it is unrealistic to expect politicians to maintain close relationships with everyone who supported them during election campaigns, citizens should also not have to rely on political contacts to secure opportunities.
“We must therefore stop asking politicians to maintain permanent personal relationships with everyone who helped them and start building institutions that make those relationships largely irrelevant,” he said.
He called for transparent criteria, competitive processes, published outcomes, auditable decisions and effective appeal mechanisms in public administration, saying these would help restore confidence in state institutions.
“The objective should be a non-connection state: a state in which rules outperform relationships, merit defeats patronage, and institutions deliver what citizens presently seek through personal access,” he said.
Kwaku Azar concluded that a well-functioning constitutional democracy should ensure that access to public services does not depend on whether a politician answers a citizen’s phone call.
“In a properly functioning state, it should not matter very much whether a politician answers your call. The institution should answer,” he wrote.
