Better A Promise Than Nothing! Why We Must Pay Attention To The President’s Promise

In 2007, when I became settled in my mind about marriage, I only wanted a certain lady to promise me that she would marry me. At that point, I knew that the proverbial “light at the end of the tunnel,” was simply a mirage. But I just wanted a promise. I needed the promise to keep me going and to remain anchored to achieving my academic ambitions. This was precisely because her promise would keep me from distracting myself with any lady that passed in front of me.

Given that I am a Zongolese, residing in Maamobi (the residential area of Nima), I knew and understood the burden of being labelled a “camboo boy” (“camboo” for camping boot). A “camboo boy” was a derogatory term coined to designate students, especially those of us who appeared to have no end to our schooling. Most of the ladies in the community in the beginning of the twenty-first century were not interested in “camboo boys”. They wanted young men who had dared the desert to cross the dreaded Mediterranean Sea to catch a glimpse of their fortunes in coveted Western Europe countries.

But since I lacked the courage to travel on an arid land, as a "camboo boy", my hope did not lie in travelling. My hope was in a lady's promise. The marriage journey begins with a promise and ends with a promise! “I promise to take you as my spouse” (promise when contracting marriage) and “we shall meet again” (promise when death separates marriage). Another way of saying this is: Marriage begins with “till death do us part” (establishing the marriage covenant) and ends with “till we meet again” (when death ends the marriage covenant). These expressions are promises, based on God's promise!

In the history of Israelites, what kept them going, in the face of dire challenges, was not what they had seen, but what they had been promised. They trusted the promise Moses gave them. Given that the Israelites were in bondage to the most powerful nation at the time – the Egyptian Empire, it took a promise to convince the Israelites to think differently. The Israelites had every reason to dispute the promise of Moses because they had never seen a land flowing with milk and honey. Their experience in Egypt, after the rule of the Hyksos, was nothing but toil and pain. All they knew was doing the bidding of their taskmasters. But why would these people, forming into a nation, decide to disrespect the authority of Pharaoh Ramses II in 14th C BC to go and search for a land that they could not even imagine? Why would they even risk walking through uncharted path? Why must they even submit themselves to a fugitive person like Moses? The answer is simple: A promise.

In the face of the coronavirus (COVID-19) that has upended the world and scuttled our fundamental rights to movement, worship, social gathering, education, and trading, we are faced with two things: promises and despair. We have the choice to be hopeful and trust that all will be well in the fight against the virus or we can succumb to despair to give up any efforts at fighting the virus. The challenge with the virus is that it is not visible. So, the fight against it does not also follow the conventional norms of either pitched battle or intercontinental ballistic missile battle. The invisibility of the virus has contributed to its designation as a war against an invisible enemy. But it is not a fight against an invincible enemy, because of the promises of the fusion of science and religion.

But the invisibility of the virus has given rise to a portfolio of conspiracies. Some of these conspiracies are so weird and logically incomprehensible. But many of us are happy to believe these conspiracies, precisely because conspiracies have the psychosocial effect of helping us to make sense of what is rationally inexplicable or insensible! Conspiracies are part of the constructed narratives of seeking meaning out and of something that is indeed weird. It also forms our confirmation biases, which titillate us in the face of fear. Through conspiracies, we either bond or fragment.

My question, however, is why do we accept conspiracies and yet not promises? The president of Ghana, Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo, in his COVID-19-related address to the nation on Sunday, April 26, 2020, said that his government has decided to invest in the country's health infrastructure by building 88 district hospitals to boost the capacity of the nation to fight epidemics. This is precisely because the current crisis has exposed the loopholes and weaknesses in Ghana's health service. Certainly, it is a trite knowledge that the COVID-19 has deeply exposed the challenges of our health infrastructure. Both the New Patriotic Party (NPP) and the National Democratic Congress (NDC) admit that Ghana's health infrastructure has proven incapable of dealing with the crisis at hand. Implicitly, these two political parties that have dominated national politics since Ghana re-democratized in 1992 have admitted that they have failed the nation's health sector. Given this tacit admission and trite observation, one would have thought that the NDC or some of our political and social commentators would have hailed the promise the president made. But, as usual, Ghanaians are divided on the promise, largely on partisan lines. Depending on whether one is a supporter of NPP or NDC, one's reaction will be informed by one's chancing of either clinging to power or wrestling power from an 'enemy'. Some professors, as it were, are also giving us statistics to show why the president cannot build the number of hospitals he has promised. Some entertainers in the country have also cast doubt over the promise of the president.

In a conversation with a colleague over the subject, she was quick to tell me that the president cannot do what he is promising. And, like many Ghanaians, she gave all the reasons, including previous failed promises, to accentuate her views that the president will fail Ghanaians. In response, I told her I believe in promises and so, I believe in the president. I believe in the president because he has given us enough reasons to vote for or against him if elections are held on December 7, 2020. For those who are in the camp of the NDC, the promise of the president is a good reason to unveil the “lies” of the president and to capitalize on it to launch a robust campaign against him. For those in the NPP, if the president can fulfil his promise, it will give them an additional reason to vote for him. Either way, we need the promise for pragmatic and political reasons. And either way, all some of us want to see are more hospitals since sicknesses are not the predicament of any particular group of people.

There is also the question of being realistic with promises. In 1998, as a fresh basic school graduate – getting ready to go to West African Secondary School (WASS), I remember one of our church elders teaching us (the youth) about setting goals and making promises. He said emphatically that our goals and promises must be achievable, time-bound, and realistic. We all got tickled and felt we had discovered the secret to success in life. But was/is it? If we gauge the president's promise against these indexes, certainly we can simply shame the president that he is seeking to build castles in the air. But if we think of it as the president as exerting himself to be different and daring his limitations to achieve something different, then the president is right.

In life, when you plan to achieve anything of importance, orbiting within the principles of setting goals will not help in any way. The only way these principles will be helpful is when one wants to achieve nothing new or wants to be mediocre. Sticking to the principles of goal setting has temporary benefit, but it confines one in the loop of being pleased with remaining in the orbit of limitation. In short, the principles of goal setting will soothe you to do nothing unique. But what we do know from history is that all revolutions in science, religion, economics and politics were pioneered by men and women who dared the status quo. They had to challenge conventional knowledge and received wisdom. They had to be countercultural in their approach!

They had to promise themselves of what was considered stupid and insane. Just read the stories about the invention of aeroplanes by the Wright brothers. They were not engineers and yet they did the unthinkable. Their invention came from a promise from their father, Milton Wright, who was only a priest! Today, when you fly an aeroplane, you might think it is part of God's direct creations. It is not, it came from the promise of an uncreated Creator controlling His creation and a creature seeking to contribute to God's creation through the promise.

One of the key logics of the modern university, marking a rupture from the pre-modern and medieval eras, is to challenge conventional knowledge. That is why most students who go to tertiary institutions are likely to (re)search – reinvestigating or searching again – about what is known. The re-search project is to produce something relatively novel about what we thought we knew. If one reproduces any knowledge that is already known (labelled as “Grandpa” at the University of Cape Coast - UCC), one was likely to score a low mark.

I remember that while most of my colleagues at the UCC in 2008 were seeking to reproduce long essays, my "twin brother", Kofi Atsu Semanu Adzei, decided to write about something relatively unknown at the Department of African Studies. He decided to explore the relevance of reggae music in the attainment of nationalism and Pan-Africanism. It was the kind of re-search that easily scored a grade 'A'. But it was the kind of research that demanded him to re-think differently and creatively. Most of our colleagues who were following the norm of reproducing "Grandpa" scored nothing better than a grade "B". Anyone with experience at the UCC can understand the meaning of getting "B" or less.

Impliedly, the president is thinking differently. He is challenging himself to stretch his muscles. He is challenging economic permutations and political analyses. He is daring reality. He wants to be different. He is re-thinking like an altruistic mad leader. And that is exactly the kind of leadership we want. A leader who decides on the exception and thinks in the mentality of “madness”. It is better for him to promise 88 district hospitals and for him to build less than the number for others to continue and add to it than not to do it at all.

When Akosombo was to be built in the 1961, many Ghanaians said it was an impossible task. It was not just a matter of the mundane world, it involved spirituality. It is alleged that in the final analysis, Nkrumah had to engage the service of the Senegalese Sufi master, Ibrahim Nyass, to help with the project. Today, we are all beneficiaries of what the “good” people of Ghana said was impossible. In fact, when Nkrumah planned to hold the meeting of the Organization of African Unity (OAU, now AU) in Accra on 21 – 26 October 1965, some people said those meetings were impossible to organize. Again, when he felt the conference organization was running into difficulties, he sought the help of a ritual expert, Alhaji Tuli, for assistance. Today, we celebrate Nkrumah, forgetting that most of the projects he decided to do were considered impossible and unrealistic.

In the end, we live because of promises. We sleep without knowing we will wake up, but we have a certain promise that once we go to bed as healthy people, we will wake up from our sleep (even though it does not always happen). We risk travelling, because we have the promise that once a driver or pilot is well trained and certified, we will arrive at our destination safely.

At least, for once, let us believe that the president will be able to deliver on his promise. Whether it is a political campaign strategy or not, our interest is not so much about which political party is leading us, as it is about which political party is providing the basic needs of Ghanaians. What most of us want is that our president will build district hospitals that we can all use. If he fulfils his promise, we can choose to vote for him or not, but if he fails, we have every reason to cast him out during elections. This is precisely because the promise must be held as a litmus test in the December 2020 elections (if we can vote).

Finally, as a Zongolese, I look forward to a promise that my communities will be reconstructed as modern cities, as Nkrumah envisioned for Maamobi and Nima in the 1950s. Life is a promise. For people of faith, like myself, we live and act the way we do, because of Jesus' promise to give us eternal bliss.

Satyagraha
Charles Prempeh ([email protected]), African University College of Communications, Accra