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Dr Emmanuel Akwetey, Executive Director of the Institute for Democratic Governance (IDEG), has said there was the need for the country to make hard choices now to guarantee a better future for the people. He said �there can be no urgent solutions to the problems currently facing the country unless the structural limitations inherent in the country�s political system were addressed to ensure efficiency.� Dr Akwetey said this at a day�s Media Sensitization Workshop on Multi-party Governance and Constitutional Reforms in Ghana to equip journalists with knowledge on local, national and international affairs to enable them to adequately perform their roles as agenda-setters in the domain of development policy and the democratic process of the country. The workshop, which was organised by IDEG in Accra, was attended by about 40 journalists from all the regions. Dr Akwetey suggested the election of Metropolitan, Municipal and District Chief Executives (MMDCEs) as well as the scrapping of the winner-takes-all-system of governance to address the structural limitations in the country�s political system. He said this would not only ensure accountability but would also get the political parties busy thinking through the country�s development problems and ways of solving them. Dr Akwetey said the two major political parties were neck to neck in terms of their support base and to exclude almost half of the population out of government was not good for the country�s democratic development. He said opposition parties would only resort to campaigning at all times for power instead of coming out with better alternatives to develop the country. He said if MMDCEs were elected people would know who amongst them was performing well to renew his or her mandate and vice-versa and this would encourage competition amongst the MMDCEs to effectively discharge their functions to save their jobs. Dr Akwetey suggested a reduction in the number of internal elections that political parties held or a merger of those elections to create enough time for policy advocacy to deliver better services to address the challenges facing the country. He said the numerous internal elections had made the political parties �electioneering machinery� and roping them into the country�s governance system would get them busy and turn them away from being electioneering machinery. Dr Linda Akua Darkwa, Research Fellow and Focal Point for Training at the Legon Center for International Affairs and Diplomacy, stressed the need for technocrats to represent the country at conferences where treaties were developed to ensure that such treaties served the best interest of the country.