<<Print>>I note with amusement the take of several of us on events of the past two weeks ranging from the much-anticipated elections in Nigeria, the decision of some well-known supposedly non-partisan Ghanaians to run for office as Members of Parliament, and other related matters.
I have decided to so describe these seemingly unrelated matters as evidence of a troubling phenomenon in our political life of late.
Let us take the Nigerian elections first. My readers will remember that in my last epistle before Easter, I wished our neighbours to the east of Ghana the very best even in the face of the most dire predictions of doom and mayhem in the wake of the polls.
There are indeed professional African doom mongers in this world, and they have active members right here on the continent, assisting strangers and those who do not love the black man to paint all of us in the most negative light possible.
What is surprising is that these people know we are not the toast of the rest of the world, even at the best of times when we were behaving and conducting our affairs the very way their favoured states did theirs, yet they find common cause to put us down.
Perpetual protestors
Our local members of this clique of perpetual protestors completely lost it when General Buhari was resoundingly chosen by the Nigerian people as their President. Overnight, hitherto intelligent folks became pathetic lotto forecasters, predicting what in reality had happened in that country at least twice since the dawn of the 4th Republic in 1993. But as fully paid-up and faithful members of the international brigade of African doom mongers, they would rather die than find something good to say about the Ghana example.
We in this country know General Buhari very well. And his late sidekick, General Tunde Idiagbon, who was the harsh, unsmiling face of the famous, or is it notorious War Against Indiscipline [WAI]. I remember they came to power on a very suspicious day, December 31, 1983, that is exactly two years after the December 31, 1981 coup that brought then Chairman J.J. Rawlings to power the second time in Ghana.
The general impression at the time was that General Buhari was an ally of Chairman Rawlings, as the general had also gotten rid of the civilian government of President Shehu Shagari.
Oil embargo
Elected President Shagari had entered the book of infamy here in Ghana as the Nigerian President who imposed an oil embargo on Ghana and soon followed with the expulsion of over a million Ghanaian residents in his country in the very style of the 1970 expulsion of Nigerian residents by the Busia regime via the infamous Aliens Compliance Order, which resonates to this day in our politics.
These very harsh measures were seen as a bid to destabilise Ghana and prepare the grounds for the removal of Chairman Rawlings and the PNDC. So when General Buhari struck on December 31, 1983, there was a strong whiff of Ghanaian complicity, never proven nor substantiated.
General Buhari has reinvented himself as a civilian politician and managed to force a change of party in governance in Nigeria for the first time since the country had civilian, constitutional rule in 1999. Whatever is new that has occurred in Nigeria is history in this country, because we have had two changes of parties since 1993, and we have had President Kufuor conceding in 1996 and President Mills in 2004. The concession of Nana Akufo-Addo in 2013 was the immediate result of a court ruling, and not necessarily of one who believes implicitly in the power of the ballot to change governments, and so does not count.
We also had a biometric voter registration system at our last elections in 2012, though I must quickly add that those who sent us all to court afterwards were the very people who persuaded our Electoral Commission to go biometric. Even more, we have had our own version of Professor Jega, the unflappable Dr Afari-Gyan, supervising these feats now praised in Nigeria and Africa as unique.
As a student of history, the only lesson I take from the hopelessly multi-ethnic Nigerian state is that their success is another fillip to the state-making efforts of imperial Britain and the League of Nations over a hundred years ago. Failure, like what we are witnessing now in other British creations in the Middle East, would have been a condemnation of the skills of British diplomacy and imperialism, not a mark of the lack of democracy or good governance in another African country, even though the most populous and economically important.
Taming beast of democracy
From this day onwards, we all can take comfort that Nigerians want to succeed despite the ill wishes of those who should have known better inside and outside this country, just like Ghana has succeeded in taming the wild beast of democracy for 22 years now.
The other amusing development is the decision of a few of us, hitherto believed to be non-partisan, to run for office as members of Parliament on the ticket of the opposition New Patriotic Party. What I find amusing is the near-universal criminalisation of all political activities, especially the partisan type, by these brave individuals. It never ceases to amaze me the way some of us behave, as if partisan politics is a mortal sin created by conscienceless men and women to line their deep pockets. For some of us, the honest public-serving politician does not exist, and this explains the furious discussions going on since this very welcome news broke.
It is legitimate and legal to belong to a political party, and certainly it is not a crime to let it be known that one belongs to this or that party. By making it appear that partisan politics is for the greedy and self-serving, one sullies one’s ambition as merely a chance to have a bite at the luscious cherries of public funds one condemned in the past. That is the problem.
Answer
The answer is that it is not true that all who are in politics are self-serving. There are fantastic politicians, just like there are fantastic lawyers, doctors, tailors, engineers, messengers and other professionals. How many lawyers practising now were motivated to join the profession because of the example of the bad lots among them? Or more to the point, who are your role models in a calling you have condemned as unworthy of human sacrifice and effort?
This is a self-created Cup of Hemlock these critics of politicians have to drink. The mighty energies devoted to this self-defense may more be a sign of the guilty consciences weighing down these otherwise fine citizens. This country is run on party political lines because we wanted it so. What has happened for some of us to make it appear improper to wish to serve the public interest in this manner? A strong stench of bad conscience and hypocrisy runs through all the commentaries I have read so far.
For my selfish part, I notice that a very fine Abura man, Kojo Oppong Nkrumah, has fled the land of our ancestors to stand rather in the Eastern Region. I refuse to understand this betrayal.