Behold, an Xmas president

We make quite a gallant pair behind the battle lines of sharply dissenting opinions, me and my PC. (I am in no mood for good grammar today!) Whenever I am consumed with passion over a nagging subject, the keyboard usually becomes a blazing machine gun: Ratatatatat…

Today is eerily different: I am sitting behind the darned machine, feeling inexplicably very miserable: The keyboard can't fire a single shot!

Maybe it is because Election Day is only a few days away and we all need to be careful what we say. One anti-bush fire campaign poster portrays Smokey the Bear as a children's hero and an accompanying campaign message reminds children that "Smokey's friends don't play with matches."

Maybe, all I should do is sit down and grumble, which is far safer than playing with matches. For those of us perpetually trapped in the world of cynicism, grumbling is the spice of life anyway. That is why I am always complaining even when there is absolutely nothing whatsoever to complain about.

I grumble when it rains and grumble when it shines. I grumble about the excessive warmth when it is hot and complain bitterly when it is cold. Oh yes, me, I love to grumble all the time.

In politically hyper-sensitive times like these, grumbling from cynics helps to keep the big boys in the house from getting so intoxicated with authority or over animated in the pursuit of it, as to jump over the edge taking the twenty-plus million of us along with them.

Grumble, grumble: The Electoral Commission disenfranchised me the last polling time around. I returned home from an outlandish geographical location where I had been for a while to learn that Dr Gyan had compiled a new voters register while I was away. You can't vote, mate, I was told.

I grumbled and grumbled about the injustice and then I grumbled some more, but a fat lot of good it all did in the end, I did not vote.

This time round, I have a vote for all it is worth but I am so freaked out and pissed off silly with the negative vibrations echoing through the campaign atmosphere.

I am wondering whether it would not be the proper thing to walk into a polling booth on December 7, stuff the ballot papers into my pocket and walk out again grumbling about the many unanswered questions, about democracy.

I have come to the very abrupt conclusion after monitoring elections across the globe, that a presidential election is not necessarily won by the best candidate in terms of personal integrity and national leadership qualities.

Except where there is an overwhelming national desire for political change, it is often the candidate who wages the most powerful campaign who gets to win: Human beings tend to gravitate toward a contender who somehow, attracts the greatest attention!

I don't know if this has something to do with some unwritten law of physics or plain old psychology of the masses, but the implications for democracy have left me staring at the ceiling.

In our part of the world, the level of voter awareness about the broader issues of democracy presents the same challenges and raises the same worrying questions. Come along and let us sneak incognito into a polling booth with the average voter and see what happens:

We are in the booth with the voter now, see? Like every voter, he is familiar with the face of the presidential candidate he wants to vote for. He looks at the ballot paper for the parliamentary election and realises that he has never met any of them and would not be able to make any of them out from Adam in the street.

So what does he do Jomo? He simply looks for the symbol of the party whose presidential candidate he voted for, and makes a thumb print beside the photo of the parliamentary candidate which appears beside the symbol.

'Agbenaa'. Civic duty completed but the candidate the man voted for may be the very least qualified among the candidates, to represent him in Parliament!

Yet vote we must, Jomo, and there has been a fierce crossfire of arguments over the integrity of the coming elections and the possibility of violence. In the process, the word "justice" has managed to sneak past the linguistic barriers where we must all stand guard to avoid unnecessary confusion.

It was the political opposition which unwittingly smuggled the word into the discussion and now the opposition is paying a price:

The opposition has been asking how there could be peace during and after the election without justice, to which candidate Nana Akufo-Addo's campaign spokesman, Dr Arthur Kennedy, recently replied that if peace were indeed dependent on justice, there would have been no peace in Ghana because of the atrocities and injustices committed during past military regimes.

See? Confusion galore. The reference here is to fairness and transparency in the election and not the much broader concept of, justice.

The broader concept has enough meaning to keep a university law faculty busy for ten semesters running! Besides, why hold up our current national aspirations to the tragic standards of a past bloody and chaotic national upheaval?

Luckily, there is a way round the confusion, Jomo: All the opposition needs to do to put the stakes in a clearer perspective is simply to substitute "fairness" for "justice", as in "total transparency and fairness."

That way, there will be no "gidigidi" and "basabasa" and we can have a dandy Christmas complete with rice, chicken, drinks, bright lights and a one-day hypocritical exhibition of the usual pretentious show of love and goodwill to neighbour.

If the candidate who gets elected has a genuine passion for people, God will have made a Christmas gift to us. People, Jomo. Politics should be about a passion for people.

Have you ever seen anyone approach any endeavour with real passion and fail? It is impossible for any leader who is very passionate about the welfare of his people to fail in his bid to give them a decent life.

Some will argue that we have seen considerable economic progress in this country in recent years, but, hey, who is enjoying what there is on offer by way of an improved quality of life and living? The people? Nah!

It is the con men, wealthy local and foreign businessmen, tourists, visiting dignitaries, people in high political office and their yes men, cronies and lackeys, yah?

Credit: George Sydney Abugri; Email: [email protected]; Website: www.sydneyabugri.com