Ghana under prevailing COVID-19 pandemic

For the second week running, the columnist features again his guest writer, Senior Citizen, Dr Asibi Abudu, who rose from a Cert ‘B’ teacher and a police constable to earn a PhD in Economics in the USA in 1957.

He became chief economist at the BoG and later Head of National Economic Intelligence in the Busia Administration.

According to the world’s topmost experts in virology and epidemiology, the current COVID-19 pandemic and others yet to follow could last several decades.
Social distancing, community distancing, lock-downs, lock-ins and travel restrictions are likely to be permanent worldwide.

That is why people in economically advanced countries now stay at home and use computers and smart phones for shopping, teaching and learning, office based work, voting at elections and for various other activities that previously required people to assemble in groups or in crowds.

Unfortunately, poverty, low technology and endemic corruption in Ghana and other less developed countries will continue to make responses to the pandemic by developed countries seem like science fiction to us.

Therefore, for various functions, we shall continue to use the now outdated methods of assembling as groups or even in crowds.

However, even the most thorough precautions cannot protect us from repeated cycles of COVID-19 and related predicted pandemics.

Therefore, we shall keep adding additional crises to our systematically weak medical facilities if we continue to do things as usual.

We must use the opportunity presented by the present disruptions and others in the future to discard obsolete institutions and practices that retard national progress.

For example, the prevailing system of governance in Sub-Saharan Africa was forced on us at independence by European colonialist.

This system has been an expensive, thoroughly adversarial, population-polarising, acrimony-reinforcing, conflict promoting and nation retarding, multiparty winner-takes-all governance.

Therefore, we need to adopt a more harmonious and productive alternative system of governance that would infuse more health and vigour into our nation, while speeding the evolution of our democracy, nation building, social cohesion and rapid economic development.

Complementary

This would involve adopting the following complementary strategies that Sub-Saharan Africans have used for almost 200,000 years and still prevail in rural Africa:

1. The use of consensual decision making in arriving at all conclusions in matters related to national and all lower levels of governance; and

2. Specific constituencies within the population nominating their respective best representatives to an advisory, legislative and administrative body, as further explained below.This system of governance will function under a new but more relevant national constitution than the present 1992 version.

Elements of the new structure for governance in Ghana shall include:

1. A Presidential Council or Presidency of three individuals, one of whom must always be a woman, to serve as the highest executive body in the country.

Respective nominations to this body shall come from the three main political traditions in Ghana: the Nkrumahist Tradition (CPP), the Danquah-Dombo-Busia Tradition (NPP) and the National Democratic Congress (NDC). The basis for selecting these three contributors to this council include the facts that each has once formed and completed at least one full term as government; and political allegiance within our population is divided mainly among these three traditions.

2. The Presidency will be assisted by a National Consultative Assembly (NATCA), which shall have advisory, legislative and administrative responsibilities.

Its members shall be nominated mostly by an approved set of Civil Society Organisations (CSOs).

To be eligible for selecting a participant to the NATCA, a civil society organisation must have active members in each of our 16 administrative regions.

The Presidency and the NATCA must respectively arrive at their decisions by consensus. Whenever the Presidency disagrees with any decision referred to it by NATCA, both institutions or their representatives shall meet and work out a joint consensus.

Members of both the Presidency and the NATCA shall serve for five years before being replaced by fresh nominees.

Rotations

After each set of cycles of rotations in memberships, each of our 16 administrative regions would have contributed respectively a male and female member to the presidential council and to the NATCA.

Accordingly, in order to enable the process of the selection of members to be thoroughly objective and free of any human manipulations or biases, a relevant computer programme shall be used for the random choices of which gender and administrative regions would be key criterion. The three respective political traditions shall nominate their members for the presidential council; and the respective civil society organisations shall nominate for the NATCA.

The determination of the respective nominations shall satisfy at least two conditions.

The first is that, for any candidate to qualify for nomination to serve in the Presidency or in the NATCA, traditional rulers, indigenous senior citizens and opinion leaders within each administrative region must agree by consensus that the nominee hails from one of the local ethnic groups.

The second condition, as already stated, would be to use a random computer programme to ensure that the entire nomination process is free of any human bias.

The nomination procedure for choosing candidates for the Presidential Council and for the NATCA is far superior to that of elections, because:

1. Under normal circumstances, any group, organisation or country would use its best rather than just average performers to represent it at important fora such as in international competitions.

2. Therefore, the political parties and the civil society organisations would nominate their best candidates for the Presidential Council and for the NATCA;

3. Accordingly, in terms of quality, maturity and experience, members in these two institutions of governance would be more compatible than in our current parliaments and other related elective institutions, where members are thoroughly incompatible in maturity, education, experience and in several other ways; and

4. It would be in the interests of political parties and civil society organisations to ensure that from our various ethnic groups within each of our 16 administrative regions, they groom enough potential candidates worthy of representing them in our respective two institutions of governance. The benefits of these requirements to the nation are obvious.

Subordinate

The NATCA shall have its subordinate institutions such as the Regional Consultative Assemblies (REGCAs),the District Consultative Assemblies (DISCAs) and the Municipal Consultative Assemblies (MUNISCAs). The size of membership in these subordinate bodies and the nature of their responsibilities shall be determined by the NATCA.

In discharging its administrative responsibilities, the NATCA shall create two institutions. One of these would be the National Economic Planning Secretariat (NEPLAS), while the other would be the National Economic Monitory Office (NEMO).

The respective responsibilities of NEPLAS and NEMO would include:

1. Organising periodic national economic development plans and systematically monitoring their implementations in all sectors of the economy;

2. Ensuring that all public institutions are monitored in performing their respective services;

3. Ensuring that where necessary, outputs from the public sector should converge to diversify and grow the private economic sector; and provide total impacts that improves the lives of average citizens.

4. Functioning as both coach and referee over the entire economy and ever ready to brief the Presidency, the NATCA or any group of citizens on the state of the economy and the extent of its achievement of economic and social progress. Elaborations and refinements to the proposal presented so far are in my books: A Proposed Framework For Governing Ghana Beyond 2020; and Fixing Ghana.

Writer’s E-mail: elzakmediaconsult@yahoo.com/Tel. 0275 193140