85,000 random thoughts!
General Dwight David Eisenhower was the 34th President of the United States. At the time of his election in 1952, he was the President (we in Ghana would say vice chancellor) of Columbia University.
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He had previously been the first supreme Commander of the armed forces of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation.
He had become a Republican Party member the year of his election, having rebuffed several attempts by the retiring Democratic Party President, Harry Truman, to join the Democrats and run for President.
President Eisenhower was one of the lucky politicians in electoral history in America who had been drafted into the highest office by across- the-board national organisations desirous of having the services of famous and accomplished citizens as holders of the highest office in the land. The most famous beneficiary of such drafting campaigns was the victorious Union General Ulysses Grant, the 18th President.
What had led some American citizens to draft the unwilling Ike into presidential politics was neither his presidency of Columbia University, an Ivy League University, nor his command of NATO forces in 1948, it was rather his leadership of Western forces in the Second World War which had ended in 1945.
Indeed, it was this leadership role in the military that led the Columbia search committee to choose him to head Columbia. He had no record whatsoever as an academic or as an intellectual. He had no further academic qualification apart from his West Point diploma acquired in 1915.
Barrier to popular participation
I was led into these thoughts when the largest opposition party, the New Patriotic Party (NPP), published the tentative programme guiding the opening of nominations for the presidential candidacy of the party this year.
To pick nomination forms, an interested person had to pay a non-refundable GH¢10,000, and on return of the filled forms, a further GH¢75,000, also non-refundable, had to be paid to permit the person to participate in the primary election to select the NPP Presidential Candidate for the 2016 presidential elections.
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It is amazing that a party which seeks election to national office based on universal adult suffrage and nothing more, finds nothing wrong with this gargantuan barrier to popular participation in the process of choosing its presidential candidate.
Way back in 1998, the NPP imposed the princely sum of ¢25,000,000, or GH¢2,500 in today’s currency, for the same purpose. I remember my friend, Lawyer Agyare Koi-Larbi, protested to the party’s chairman, Mr Peter Ala-Adjetey, in a letter which the latter dismissed with the unctuous legalism that the protest did not debar a contestant from paying the filing fee first and protesting later.
Of course, I am fully aware of the supposed reasoning behind the levying of this unconscionable amount. It is intended to whittle down to reasonable numbers the eventual contestants to prevent the obscenity of 2007, when 17 people emerged, several of them ministers in the outgoing President Kufuor government, to vie to succeed him.
The obscenity in my opinion was not the sheer numbers, all of whom comfortably paid the huge fees charged without a whimper from civil society, but the regional profile of the aspirants.
This is set to repeat itself in the NPP once again this year, cementing the unfortunate impression that the highest position available in the party is restricted to core regions, with non-core regions being consigned to fight over the second position on the eventual ticket with no hope of future advancement.
The reference to President Eisenhower earlier comes in here. A ‘’draft whoever’’ movement is what the party needs to resolve this conundrum of a restrictive barrier that, strangely enough, only produces the very impression it is designed to dispel.
One would have thought that the clever people in the NPP would have settled on a party member from a non-core region that all have nothing against, formed a national movement, and dragged him or her to the primary to, at one go, kill the two birds of core regional entitlement and expansion of opportunity to all to truly ‘nationalise’’ the presidential candidacy of the party.
Caveats
Two caveats must be noted here to further illustrate the self-created problem of the party in presenting itself as democratic and equalitarian, which has rather achieved the opposite in popular perception.
The first is the seemingly obvious choice for a possible drafting, Dr Bawumia. The perfect political moment for this would have been the 2012 polls, now he is seen as too tied to the Nana Akufo-Addo campaign to make the necessary impact as a consensus candidate.
The second caveat is the immense difficulty persuading ordinary supporters in core regions that anybody from outside is ipso facto qualified to merit their unflinching backing. Let me give an example.
About a week ago, one of the most harassed public officials in this country, the articulate and judicious Nana Yaa Jantuah, the public face of the ‘dumsor’ phenomenon, visited her ageing father in Kumasi, the veteran Nkrumaist politician, Francis A. Jantuah. Several Kumasi radio stations, on hearing of this visit, called to interview her, and questioned her as to whether she is a true Ashanti, believing her to be in league with others to discomfort her own people. This attachment to unreasonable explanations for ‘dumsor’ was reflected even in last Tuesday’s demonstration in Kumasi.
Never mind that unlike the ruling NDC which has proven its sensitivity to gender issues by lowering the fees for its women contestants at all levels, the GH¢ 85,000 does not discriminate.
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The most persuasive argument against this clear and extremely unfortunate instance of the monetisation of democracy is the impression it creates that everything must be okay with the economy even as the party daily chastises the government for its policies.
If prospective aspirants are being sponsored by their professional and business friends, it would mean that business is very good for these sponsors in this country, since the candidates cannot be flouting our laws by soliciting foreign support which has its own problems apart from its illegality.
If we are generous enough to assume most workers earn an average of GH¢500 each month, the filing fee is over 14 years of the salary of a worker. What can a president do for workers in four years to merit this upfront payment? The decision has succeeded in portraying the party as basically an assemblage of people who don’t care for the common man in the street.
Fortunately for the party, the meeting which decided this matter was adjourned to June 19 to conclude outstanding matters which may very well include a revision of this highly embarrassing filing fee.
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Let me steal this chance to wish our national soccer team, the Black Stars, the very best in the World Cup tournament.