Ghana Is No Leader on Continental African Democracy

Mr. Sam Okudzeto, Member of the Council of State and Former President of the Ghana Bar Association

He was part of the New Patriotic Party’s Contingent among the Membership of the Ghana National Constituent Assembly that boycotted the drafting of the 1992 Fourth-Republican Constitution that gave us the royally bastardized brand of Constitutional Democracy presently being practiced in the country. So, really, Mr. Samuel “Sam” Okudzeto/Okudjeto has little cause to complain about the fact that the aforementioned statutory instrument of democratic governance does not appear to be working in the manner in which it was originally intended to work, for which reasons, for the most part, the former President of the Ghana Bar Association (GBA) and his political and ideological bedmates and fellow travelers angrily walked out during the drafting of the 1992 Republican Constitution, largely because it was nauseatingly clear that the latter prospective instrument of governance was almost being exclusively crafted to suit the parochial interests and for the benefit of only one man and only one political party, namely, the late Chairman Jeremiah “Jerry” John Rawlings and his so-called National Democratic Congress.

Which is fundamentally why the 1992 Constitution is riddled with and thoroughly hobbled by the so-called Indemnity Clauses, primarily statutory excuses for the inexcusable and morally reprehensible and the unconscionable atrocities perpetrated against Ghanian humanity by the Rawlings-Tsikata Posse to literally get away with murder, rape and other unspeakable capital crimes (See “We're confused as a country for allowing MPs to serve as ministers — Sam Okudzeto” Modernghana.com 6/20/24).

Contrary to what the respected Second-Republican Parliamentarian would have the rest of us, his countrymen and women believe, it is actually those who signed on to actively participate in the drafting of the 1992 Constitution and then suddenly dropped the proverbial ball when things did not seem to be going their way, who ought to be squarely faulted for the seemingly insurmountable mess that our expert and authoritative legal light is now bitterly complaining about.

You see, in the 32 years, or so, since the country has been operating this politically stultifying statutory instrument of governance that Mr. Okudzeto of disconsolately complaining about, the elderly statesman’s own political party, the presently ruling New Patriotic Party (NPP), has occupied the helm of our national affairs for half of this period, during which the self-proclaimed and the self-envisaged relatively more politically and ideologically enlightened leadership of the latter institutional establishment has done little to absolutely nothing to amend our functionally bastardized 1992 Republican Constitution, which incongruously marries a Westminster or British type of Parliamentary Democracy with an American type of an Executive Presidency which, unlike the Non-Executive British or Westminster System, the President is not obligated to regularly answer to Parliament or the Representatives of the People for the conduct of the People’s Business by his Government.

Well-educated Ghanaian citizens and politicians like Mr. Okudzeto are well aware of the fact that it was because of his avid desire not to be held strictly accountable for his bloody and extortionate leadership by the Ghanaian People, that President Kwame Nkrumah discarded the Westminster System and quickly opted for an American type of a Republican System of the Executive Presidency in 1960, shortly after the British colonialists completely withdrew from their erstwhile Gold Coast Colony, having already granted the New Postcolonial Ghana political sovereignty. So, the most logical question to ask here is the following: Precisely what have Mr. Sam Okudzeto and his generation of legal and political experts done to ensure that an Independent Ghana will continue to remain the metaphorical “Lodestar” of the African Continent which an apocalyptically failed President Nkrumah had once fervidly envisioned?

The leadership of the New Patriotic Party had the prime opportunity to have revised or even quashed Article 78.1 of the 1992 Constitution, with the historic accession of President John “The Gentle Giant” Agyekum-Kufuor to the helm of the country’s affairs. But what did we get? Well, pretty much the same “State-Capturing” pabulum that had been meted Ghanaians during the 8 previous years by the Rawlings-led blood-thirsty regime of the National Democratic Congress and the 11 junta years of the Rawlings-led Provisional National Defense Council (PNDC) that Candidate John “I Have No Classmates in Ghana” Dramani Mahama recently bragged about while on the electioneering stumps in the Akufo-Addo-trimmed Volta Region.

Rather than promptly scrap Article 78.1 via a Constitutional Amendment or a nationwide Referendum, a newly elected President Agyekum-Kufuor’s first order of business priority was to promptly line up his siblings, relatives and clansmen and women for cabinet and executive portfolios. That is, pretty much the same hermetic pursuit of nepotism and tribalism religiously practiced by the Rawlings-Tsikata Diarchy would be equally studiously and religiously pursued which, by the way, would be even more shamelessly and masterfully pursued by the man whom the proverbial “Gentle Giant” had been fiercely fighting to deny the same highest office of the land that he had previously held. For, as the former Member of Parliament for Atwima-Nwabiagya Constituency, in Rural Asante, knowingly informed a bewildered Ghanaian public in the wake of the burning down of former President Rawlings’ private residence, “Not all Ghanaian citizens qualify to be elected President of our beloved Sovereign Democratic Republic.”

The glaringly unmistakable suggestion here, of course, was that the suspected culpable arsonist for the burning down of the former state-owned but criminally cannibalized Rawlingses’ private residence was none other than the epic loser of the 2008 Presidential Election. The urbane Member of Ghana’s National Council-of-State is also apt to suggest that Ghana’s utterly dysfunctional democratic culture has tragically resulted in the country’s being left far behind among the vanguard pews of the most progressive African democracies. He does not name any specific African countries, but one does not need to look that very far off to fully appreciate what Mr. Okudzeto is talking about.

Not only is the constitutional mandate to appoint the overwhelming majority of cabinet members from Parliament a statutorily inadvisable policy diktat that irredeemably undermines the Principle of the Separation of the Three Major Arms of Democratic Governance, namely, the Executive, the Legislature and the Judiciary, it also seriously shortchanges the constitutionally stipulated full-time jobs of Parliamentarians and Ministerial and Cabinet appointees. It also foments the kind of rankly corrupt culture that enables Members of Parliament who double as ministerial and executive appointees to illegally and criminally draw home double salaries, as came to light in the wake of the seismic defeat and the opportune departure of the previous Mahama-led regime of the National Democratic Congress in January 2017.

*Visit my blog at: KwameOkoampaAhoofeJr

By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., PhD
Professor Emeritus, Department of English
SUNY-Nassau Community College
Garden City, New York
September 3, 2024
E-mail: [email protected]