Why I Am So Impatient With Ghanaian Voters

Politics is about the impact policies can make; it is not entirely about who decides but what we achieve at the end of decisions.

The policies are just about making something happen or not to happen, they are causes of actions designed to maintain and promote the states of affairs. It is not about which party is in power, where the president comes from and more importantly, it is not about political parties.

Voting is a method or process for a group of people, a country for an example to make a collective decision or express an opinion, on this note, to elect the best candidate with the right policies which will maintain and promote the state of affairs.

This process is most of the time inconvenient, time wasting, and the probability that your one vote will make a difference is zero, pointless right, because I have observed three elections so far since I started thinking for myself and all the people voted for were promises instead of policies and after voting, the lives of the voters are either getting shoddier or inert with no hope of moving forward and this to me makes voting a pointless activity in Ghana.

“The probability that I’ll be the deciding vote in the 2008 presidential election is much smaller than the chance that I’ll get hit by a car on the way to the polls, if we look at it in those terms alone, it appears to be irrational,” says Kevin Lanning, PhD, paraphrasing an observation made by the late University of Minnesota psychologist Paul E. Meehl.

So why do we even bother? If there is a probability that someone is going to shot me dead or beat me up because of a ballot box or because he has been contracted to cause confusion.

It is clear that Ghanaian politicians are taking us for a jaunt, getting us to vote them into comfort in our discomfort and all they need to do that are politically ambitious promises which have no intention of maintaining or promoting anything except their political parties and of course their finances.

And the average Ghanaian voter knows all these, yet when they come out to ask us to put our lives and future to the stake and give them what they want, we don’t think twice before thronging to push them into power.

And when you imagine the reasons majority of Ghanaians go out to vote on election days, your heart will suffer from an ache. Majority vote because of party colors; to them, their party must be in power by all means. It doesn’t really matter to them the policies they are bringing on board and the rest go out wasting time in the name of, “it is our civic responsibility or right to vote,” the same people refused it as their responsibility or right to take the policies they are voting for into consideration.

This practice has been going on since independence and our attitudes towards politics and voting keep dragging the country backwards, and at times, it is very hard to blame the politicians because we have all seen what they have proven to be but we are still giving them the nod anytime they ask.

It is time we change the status quo, if we want to see change in this country, we have to first see change in how we cast our ballots.