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21.09.2014 Feature Article

What Sort of Democracy Is This, Ghana (With Additional Facts)?

What Sort of Democracy Is This, Ghana With Additional Facts?
21.09.2014 LISTEN

The most powerful organ in human anatomy is the brain. It is also where the mind has a notable presence and where an individual's personality is probably manufactured and stored. Man's world therefore translates to the state of his mind. What is more, the restricting orthodoxies of culture, traditions, or customs, for instance, are made and institutionalized by man and it is only man who can unmake and de-institutionalize them. This requires destoolment of those specific cultural practices deemed antagonistic to actualization of national development, personal growth, and homogenization of multiethnic sociality, given that a nation's greatness and relative stability have direct relation to how a group of people puts mutual knowledge of its ethnic or racial diversity to good use, among other indices.

It is also equally important to point out that those who have taken it upon themselves to criticize leadership failure and questionable national policy decisions need to do so constructively and impartially without the garrulous pen of moral smugness, taking note of the additional fact that state management is not the same as petty trading, babysitting, or sole proprietorship. Statecraft is an intellectually and emotionally exhausting, complex and sophisticated enterprise, and, what is more, its successful effectuation requires the services of outstanding individuals at the head of operation in close partnership with the popular support of the masses following from behind. It also means that “leadership” is more than just leading a people. Leadership in our opinion is a double-edged phenomenon where a leader simultaneously stays ahead of and follows from behind the people he leads. This concept implies mutual prodding between leader and people in the cause of national progression.

That leader in question is of the community from which he or she evolves; that leadership is not any kind of tree that grows apart from the soil of his or her community. It is analogous to a dead, uprooted, or living tooth and its relationship to the human gum. An uprooted tooth cannot be said to have nothing in common with the relative isolation of the gum. An ectopic tooth owes its existential standing to the anatomic grounding of the human gum. Such a model leader was the great Kwame Nkrumah, an outstanding thinker whose achievements, prescience, bravery, intelligence, mastery of statecraft, and tactical decisions shaped the politics and well-being of the Gold Coast, Africa, and the larger world. Basil Davidson, the world-famous British Africanist historian, captures Nkrumah's intellectual dynamics and political rhythm in his famous and authoritative biography “Black Star: A View of the Lives and Times of Kwame Nkrumah.” In fact, according to Harvard University's Dr. Emmanuel Kwaku Akyyeampong, a Loeb Harvard Professor of History and a Fellow of UK-based Royal Historical Society, Davidson's authoritative biographic account humanizes Nkrumah.

This brings us to Mr. Obama's historic speech in Ghana in which he said Africa needed to move past the epoch of “the strongman.” There is a disturbing irony implied in his well-intentioned homily when re-considered in the light of contemporary political developments. Visionary, intelligent, patriotic “strongmen” like Nkrumah is exactly what Ghana and Africa need today. This is not an understatement. It is a bold statement born of a conscious mind. We all know about Mr. Obama's illicit spying on Americans and foreign governments as revealed to the world by Edward Snowden (a former National Security Agency's contractor). We all know about Mr. Obama's endorsement of and clandestine, sometimes even open, collaboration with brutal theocracies like Saudi Arabia and Qatar. We all know about Mr. Obama's drone assassination of suspected terrorists without due process. We all know about Mr. Obama's moral resistance to public calls to give Marcus Garvey a posthumous pardon in light of mounting evidence establishing the FBI as the mastermind of Garvey's frame-up. We all know Mr. Obama's secretly pressuring the Cuban government to extradite Assata Shakur, a civil rights activist, to the US for trial when many believe she was actually framed up by the FBI, the New Jersey State Police, and the CIA as her previous trials and subsequent acquitals in the US proved.

Mr. Obama's foreign policy decisions and internal politics exonerate Kwame Nkrumah. How? We strongly believe Mr. Obama has finally come to realize it is always easy and cheap to pontificate from the outside, but crucial challenges posed by the internal and external dynamics of politics require draconian proaction, sometimes exertion of military might and operational suspension of legal instruments. Of course wisdom, intelligence, prescience, experience, and reliability of practical solutions are born of individuals' tactical and strategic approaches to challenges. Nkrumah probably understood this better than Mr. Obama and as a result Nkrumah's government worked hard to make sure appropriate laws were put in place to protect the new nation and private citizens as well as public officials against the subversive tendencies and terroristic acts of internal and external enemies.

The survival instinct is not something one puts out so easily since it is under the spell of biology or nature. Hopefully Mr. Obama understands this too. Moreover, Mr. Obama's failures are not uniquely and distantly different from Nkrumah's from our point of view. Nkrumah always worked within the confines of the law, not always so with Mr. Obama at every point. Besides, Mr. Obama is a lawyer and a professor of law, Nkrumah was not. Finally, Mr. Obama is lucky to have had the rich experience of an elderly nation behind his proactive decisions, unlike Nkrumah.

Let us give Nkrumah his due even while we change lanes. Dr. Kwame Amuah, Nelson Mandela's son-in-law, has this to say about Nkrumah: “The time Nkrumah was recovering from a major assassination attempt on his life and therefore access to him was restricted. Mandela, though, met all the relevant cabinet and party officials and the ANC was accorded fulsome support. This bit of history is important here as there are some who attribute Mandela's failure to meet Nkrumah as a snub. They claim the reason was that the ANC was open to all races and was losing its Pan-African identity, and that Nkrumah was leaning towards the Pan-African Congress. The idea that Nkrumah refused to meet Mandela because the ANC was opened to all South African races is far from the truth, and in fact it is not even a historical fact in the least. Nkrumah, while Pan-Africanist to boot, was equally non-racial.” Dr. Amuah also added that Mandela took Nkrumah as his hero (see New African Magazine, December 2, 2013).

Let us also put one more thing in perspective: Yes, the government of Nkrumah did in fact trade with the Apartheid government. But it was a colonial policy his government inherited from the colonial government. Ironically, it was the same Nkrumah whose tireless efforts would bring this commercial arrangement to a closure after years of internal wrangling with local politicians and with external forces of imperialism. Prof. Kwame Arhin, editor of "The Life and Work of Kwame Nkrumah," and Prof. Kwesi Jonah, author of "Nkrumah and the Decolonization of Ghana's External Trade Relations," an essay published in Prof. Arhin's edited volume, put this serious matter in historical perspective. Perspective and context make the difference in matters of critical theory and historicism. Interestingly Nkrumah's major contributions to the de-colonizing of Southern Africa and Africa in general and of Apartheid South Africa in particular is in no doubt. The 1978 UN Special Session's posthumous “gold medal” award given to Nkrumah acknowledging his significant contributions to de-colonizing South Africa is a testament to his global importance in the de-colonizing effort.

Also the SATMA Awards, created in 2005, which the people and government of South Africa posthumously awarded to Nkrumah via Ingwe Mabalabala Holdings and the National Heritage Council of South Africa speak directly to the world's, Africa's, and South Africa's indebtedness to Nkrumah. No amount of dubious revisionism and historical distortions will erase these hard facts from the annals of human history or diminish his globaal impact on history and human freedom. No amount of historical revisionism or historical distortions can accommodate the entire gamut of his contributions to human civilization. Let us swicth lanes at this moment. Unfortunately public institutions have become too patronizingly tainted by the corrupt brush of partisan politics to make them neutrally potent or operationally efficient. This is in spite of the company of another essential fact, which is that Ghanaians must surely allocate serious oversight to impartial assessment of the likely social, economic, and human costs to revolutions of any kind, Mao Zedong's Cultural Revolution being a prime example, bearing in mind our constant prescriptive allusions to cultural, intellectual, and moral revolutions as tools to appropriate in direct connection with the radical transformation of Ghana's social and political landscape.

This calls for radical change in the leadership style of Ghana's post-Nkrumah world among others. Ghana needs the radical formula of Nkrumah's style of leadership more now than ever. Ghana is indeed in dire need of help. If man lives on perpetually because he bequeaths his genetic essence to his progeny, why does every man not take it upon himself to make the world a better place prior to his passage out of it? Ghanaians wait anxiously in long queues every four years to pick one of two unprofessional thieving brigades, the NDC or the NPP, to hold them to ransom, to rob them with impunity. Is it not time for change? What a travesty of electoral politics! ICertainly Ghanaians will have a hard time deciding between which of the following twos to rule them: Afghanistan or Somalia, Ronald Reagan or P.W. Botha, Idi Amin or Adolf Hitler, Saddam Hussein or George W. Bush! This dilemma is beyond human grasp for the most part!

t looks as though Ghanaians were and are never born or created “free.” We are not saying “freedom” and “genetic longevity” are philosophically synonymous. The two are far from similar. We are simply saying that the militant gene by which which Kwame Nkrumah and others drove out colonialism seems to have been totally lost in the streaming wonderment of social gullibility and institutional impotence. Though we have made a case for a third force to replace the NDC and the NPP, we still are of the opinion that Ghanaians should not overall be too optimistic about our controversial proposition, after all, the constitution of the third force is going to come from humanity, brothers and sisters who look and behave every way like the human members of the NPP and the NDC.

That is not to say Ghanaians should not help President John Mahama to succeed. We want President Mahama to succeed against all the odds because his success will be a win for all, the nation. Ghanaians therefore need to rally around him as he deals with the many challenges confronting the nation. We merely want him to provide the strong, visionary leadership Nkrumah proffered the nascent nation as he rode the crest of de-colonization. This is all we ask of President John Mahama. More emphatically, though, the major theoretical advantage of “leading” and 'following from behind” revolves around the notion of encouraging active synchronal collaboration between a leader and the people he leads, ensuring that vigorous floods of oversight are cast around the collective behavior of a people including the leader. There is no self-serving leadership elitism here. The leader is hardly distinguishable from the plight and collective aspirations of the masses with whom he proudly identifies.

These assertions anticipate institutional independence and patriotism on the part of the people. But no democracy like Ghana's has any sustained hope of longevity in the slithering shadows of the “winner-takes-all” syndrome, a sickly political dispensation where the fluid democratic profitability of “create, loot, and share” feeds the privilege of incumbent kleptomania. The “winner-takes-all” syndrome does grossly distort the settled matrix of social equalization. Anomie, public stubbornness to institutional chaperonage, vicious circle of public kleptomania, inter-ethnic animosity, falling public health and quality of education, general hopelessness in Ghana's political and economic future, individual and collective psychological anarchy, and mutual partisan political revenge are natural outcomes of the syndrome. Then again, a democratic imperialism of the kind associated with cronyism, nepotism, doublespeak, political ethnocentrism, and demagoguery are inimical to empirical realization of social democracy.

In addition, any country a section of whose electorate votes individuals into political office on the affective strength of candidates' physique, physiognomy, gait, gestural mechanics, and English accent is not a serious democracy. Such a country is bound to have her development and growth stalled once these sentimental variables are not directly translated into hard social currencies of growth and development. Ghana is more or less such a laughable democracy. Issues that should have instead received less attention in the public space, issues ranging from political ethnocentrism, regionalism, ethnic nationalism, cheap gossip to general questions of environment pollution and corporate irresponsibility, have pre-empted popular considerations for serious matters, such as Ghana's gross political failure, parties' political philosophies, irresponsible journalism, competence, patriotism, candidates' technocratic intelligence, pervasive kleptomania, social disregard for institutional authority, yet we expect things to get better against the backcloth of widening national decay. Ghana is no doubt caught in the novelistic labyrinthine complexness of Joseph Heller's “Catch-22.”

In theory, therefore, our assertive right to political formalization of social equity, or equalitarianism, call it anyhow you like it, arguably, is deserving of public consideration, as the primary philosophical thrust of our thesis focuses on voiding the continued incrustation of “doublethink” in public psychology due to open hypocrisies associated with the spectrum of Ghana's mutually contradictory inter-partisan politics. For instance, Ghanaian politics should not be about ethnocracy or political ethnocentrism. Never. Wole Soyinka evokes a profound statement, a disconcerting remark he attributes to a former Nigerian ambassador to the United Nations. This statement indicts the emotional rhythm of political ethnocentrism, thus writing: “God in his infinite wisdom has provided different peoples with different talents. The Igbo have been provided the gift of entrepreneurship. The Yoruba make first-class administrators and educationists. The North is however singularly endowed with the gift of leadership.”

What sort of divine arrangement is this? Where does this thoughtless remark place the progressive legacies of Nnamdi Azikiwe, an Igbo; Abdulsalammi Alhaji Abubakar, a Hausa; and Gani Fawehinmi, a Yoruba? Ghana's politics is not far removed from the ambassador's idiosyncratic remark! Yes, we want to see socially marginalized groups or ethnicities included among the hands running the nation but not at the expense of competence and patriotism. Excellent curriculum vitae establishing a candidate's track record via-a-vis proven personal accomplishments, his or her level of patriotism, technocratic knowhow, internal party and national constitutions, knowledge of development economics, position on social justice, and commitment, not ethnicity, must be the movers of Ghana's political meritocracy. Sentiments and uncritical ideological biases are more likely to derail development, sowing seeds of discord among a people within a given polity. Is it any wonder a Luo is more likely to become the president of the United States of America than of Kenya? Ask Mrs. Obama and Raila Odinga!

These philosophical and cultural questions are worth the attention of those intellectually parochial Ghanaian ethnocentric firebrands who simply refuse to avail themselves of the vista of accommodating cosmopolitanism that opens into the larger world of multiethnic homogenization. Ghanaian politics seems to backtrack rather than progress. In fact, Ghanaian politics should be exercised exclusively around the twin pillars of political meritocracy and competitive democracy devoid of the element of sentimentalism. Noted elsewhere, capable, competent individuals with visionary portfolios of progressiveness to move Ghana, Africa, and the world forward, as well as those with the intellectual wherewithal, technocratic ideas among others, with patriotic appreciation of the living conditions of the masses, and with rich history of dedication to the national and continental cause, should be allowed to contest for flagbeareship and parliamentary positions without fear of intimidation or threats of any kind.

Flagbeareship and parliamentary contestations must strictly enjoy the operational stipulations of internal party constitutions and of the national constitution, nothing less. Thus, the recent open display of mobocracy by some of the contesting candidates in the leadership of the NPP was unwarranted. This should be criticized by all without the divisive particularities of political affiliations, class or ethnic biases. Ghana has come of age and must learn to move past the stinking walls of ethnic, regional, and partisan political Jim Crowism. The near-vigilante terrorism allegedly displaced by Nana Akufo-Addo's faction is one that the Bureau of National investigations (BNI) should have thoroughly investigated. That aside, there are politicians who have made serious public accusations against their colleagues, purportedly involving insinuations where certain individuals are bent on poisoning a contending leader of the opposition, yet this serious allegations may not even have caught the investigational attention of the BNI.

What is the BNI's institutional nonchalance about? Is Ghana a banana republic? Has Ghana become a failed state-in-waiting? What then are the BNI's eligibility criteria for the candidacy of criminal cases worthy of its investigational attention? Should the BNI constitute itself into a fading theocracy, like Al-Shabab's Somalia, Al-Qaeda's and the Taliban's Afghanistan, and Boko Haram's northeastern Nigeria, where it can institute mob or vigilante justice against flouters of public order? It may as well be that the middling BNI is a tyrannical tool in the sinister hand of incumbency, an institutional instrument of authority whose range of operational credibility is limited to the capricious manipulating tendencies of a given political party in power, whether of the NDC or the NPP. The element of neutrality is such a rare commodity in the commercial popularity of Ghanaian politics.

What is the alternative to the above theory? Ghanaians have consistently refused to answer this question. Could there be an answer to the question? We do not know. We do, however, know the BNI did not make good on its public declarations to turn over the suffocating heads of those arsonists who hounded Ghana during the 2012 election petition trial! The BNI is thus a paper tiger! Besides, similar to the outbreak of cholera and Ebola virus disease, allegations of such magnitude bordering on the poisoning assassination of certain Ghanaian leaders should be seen as a national security priority. But the seemingly lawless country, so-called The Gateway to Africa, does not seem to care in the least, a country where innocent babies are stolen before they are born and sold to others on the cheap, a country where professional armed robbers and their educated pen-wielding thieving politicians operate with impunity.

Could it be that the BNI sees that opposition party, the NPP, as naturally violent, internally undemocratic, and coldly evil and, therefore, waits somewhat nervelessly on the political sidelines as it watches that party sluggishly implode, destroying itself from the inside through bribery, intimidation, spate of corruption scandals, with no possibility of partisan reincarnation? We do not know!

However, it does not reflect well on the internal politics of Ghana, Ghana's goodwill, and her international image if these serious allegations are not systematically investigated, culprits prosecuted, and, consequently, punished severely if found guilty trying to steal from the law. It is not as if the social genotype of the African is one of deadening gullibility, considering the destructive tendencies of religious fundamentalism and secular tyranny. “Heirs to African thought systems and world-views are, however, equipped with antecedent traditions that enable a repudiation of both, make them capable of that liberating response,” notes Wole Soyinka, continuing: “'A plaque on both your houses!'―pronounced first in the direction of the rivaling dictatorships of secular and theocratic ideologies and, next, as a rejection of the aggressively twinned agencies of the latter, the theocratic―Christianity and Islam.” Institutional caretakers need to set harsh preventive precedents for lawbreakers, a moral responsibility Ghana has largely ignored.

Soyinka continues: “The earlier named arm of the binaries of rejection―secular despotism―has engendered its own brutal civil wars and cost millions of lives and decades in development, as African facilitators of Western and Eastern interests sought to entrench themselves in power, invoking the mission of one ideological block or the other, sometimes in rapidly alternating allegiances.” Soyinka's candid rhetorical freshness inferentially makes a beeline for the political economy of diversity, competitive democratic, and inclusiveness as preconditions for national development, national cohesion, and generational success. The twin cankers of political ethnocentrism and ethnocracy have cost Africa (and other non-African geopolitical localities) more in human lives than any other variable she could frankly bring herself to acknowledge. This is why the laws must be made to work. This is why no one must be above the law. A polity shows clinical signs of organismic exuberance if its institutions work! That is not what we see in Ghana in today.

Nonetheless, Soyinka has decried the spate of African dictatorship all his life, yet the ascendency of democratic dispensation in his own native Nigeria, for instance, has not succeeded in quelling his loud vocal and literary protestations against an institutional mongrel, “democratic imperialism” or “constitutional dictatorship.” He does not seem to appreciate the differences between military dictatorship and democratic imperialism. The rise of Boko Haram and religious violence in democratic Nigeria seem incompatible with his democratic and humanistic leanings. Moreover, political corruption has not abated under the umbrella of democracy either. What then is wrong with human nature? Is dictatorship better than democracy, or vice versa? These are questions we would Ghanaians take up! In the meantime, Ghanaians need to seriously consider the following questions if they are to make any headway in political refinement:

Are Ghanaians willing to overlook the constrictive particularities of political ethnocentrism, cheap partisan political rhetoric, and sentimental regionalism in favor of public accountability, transparency, probity and proven track record of accomplishment in respect of the two leading political parties, the NDC and the NPP, while ensuring that their leaders circumvent the moral dilemma which confronted America's Founding Fathers, that is, enacting convenient laws to protect the interests of the rich, propertied White male, stealing Native Americans' land and killing some by gifting them blankets tactically infested with smallpox and starving others to death by strategically killing herds of buffalos, the buffalo being an important symbol of Native American culture used variously for religious rituals, food, shelter, and cloth, and owning enslaved Africans, etc?

Why has politics become synonymous with evil, dirt, incompetence, shameful scandals, lies, moral stupidity, and corruption?

Are Ghanaian politicians possessed?
Is it possible politicians swear on the wrong Bible and Koran? Should politicians begin to swear on the Book of Mormon or Sikhs' Guru Granth Sahib, say, if the Koran and the Bible are not working?

Is the Golden Jubilee House the abode of evil spirits and demons and dwarfs?

Could it be that the Ghanaian expectation of politicians is hyperbolically unrealistic or that Ghanaians view the average politician as superhuman?

Are politicians different species of humans from the rest of humanity?

Is the politician morally different from the community from which he or she springs?

Could the national constitution be amended to make whichever presidential candidate that secures the second highest votes becomes the automatic vice president of the republic?

Is the constitutional dictatorship of the “winner-takes-all” approach to national governance and national problems worth retaining in the body politic?

Should Ghanaian politicians be given special psychiatric assessment where clinically unearthing the bug of political kleptomania is the focus?

In the end getting to know that “truth” is as real as the moral certainty of death will go a long way to make politics worth pursuing by men and women of conscience. Politicians sometimes forget that death awaits them in their thieving wakefulness and that their kleptomaniacal wealth is going to stay behind upon their eventful departure from earth. Certainly all men will die one day. Certainly all women will die one day. Certainly all children will die one day. Certainly all ghosts will die one day? Certainly all witches and wizards will die one day? Only “truth” and moral candor live on in the holy city of death. What remains of the world if “truth” and moral candor should eventually die with men? Is “truth” not immortal, lies mortal? Let the callous, reprobate, tongue-splitting lying politician continue to behave like a dead coffin! Or the eusocial flies following the corpse to the cemetery of moral uncertainty while at the same time refusing to be buried with the dead.

What sort of democracy is this, Ghana's? Is Ghana's “winner-takes-all” democratic imperialism or constitutional dictatorship any different from the rest of the world's given its philosophical origin in Western democracy, particularly America's? Is Ghana willing to move away from the emotional center of George Orwell's “Animal Farm”? Truth, we believe, always triumphs over lies. Truth, we believe, is God and godly. Truth, we believe, is man and manly. Truth, we believe, is woman and womanly. Truth, we believe, is elder and elderly. Truth, we believe, is human and humanly. And “truth” can equally pass for the Devil, an intersecting point of friction between the “moral objectivity of truth” and “the moral subjectivity of lies”! Politics pushes itself more toward the subjective axis of lies! Ghana's democracy is based on “the moral subjectivity of lies”!

Let the flies of lies accompany the corrupt politician to the cemetery of moral uncertainly. The good people of Ghana have spoken. And can only do as much. Let “truth” do the rest!

We shall return…

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