A blast from the past — Part 2
Two columns ago, I tried to recapture for my readers the sense of our reality in the days of military rule in the 1970s by reproducing here editorial musings of this very paper. I thought it was a rather lazy way of filling my allotted space until I realised it had received some favourable reaction in some quarters of our country on the essential signposts we have crossed to be where we are today, 23 uninterrupted years into civilian, constitutional rule.
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Today, however, I will do something similar, and yet different. Similar in the sense that I will reproduce excerpts from publications directly relevant to our current dispensation, yet far back enough to endow them with prophetic powers and insights for our present.
Tributes to Prof. Adu Boahen
‘’In the book of tributes to Professor Adu Boahen entitled ‘Celebration of the Life and Legacy of the late Professor Emeritus Adu Boahen’ we find on page 76 the tribute of Dr Amoako Tuffuor in which he wrote, “On the day of the presidential elections, I drove Prof. to vote first at the primary school opposite Asante house at Roman Ridge, Accra. Thereafter, I took the catholic priest’s cassock and drove him and Auntie Mary to Kumasi according to plan and for me to vote as well. The next day when the results started coming in, we realised that a massive rigging operation had taken place. I and Bishop Asante Antwi had received lots of NDC thumb-printed ballot papers outside the ballot boxes, and thrown in a garbage dump. We rushed to report to the chief at the Kumasi Central Police Station, and the police threatened us with handcuffs if we did not give them the fraudulent ballot papers, saying those were government property. We had earlier planned to show them to The Pioneer.’’
This statement, about the professor, the Catholic priest cassock, as loaded as it was, appearing in the book of tributes to such a statesman by no less a figure in contemporary Ghana politics as Dr Kwame Amoako Tuffuor, seems to have escaped the obvious questions of the Ghanaian media and public.
By sheer act of God, as lawyers may put it, the 1992 presidential elections had been scheduled to precede the parliamentary elections by a couple of weeks. While the professor possessed everything in free and fair elections to beat his opponents, the incumbent possessed the capacity to use the extra legitimate or ultra vires means to defeat the professor. In such an event, there was the need for a fallback plan.
Options
Two alternative options were opened to the Prof. and the secret security committee. The first was to smuggle the professor outside to a friendly and supportive neighbouring country to form the NPP Ghana Government in exile. Thereafter, the professor as President would work out the opportunity for the eventual NPP Government entry to the Osu Castle, Accra. A civil war in Ghana could not be ruled out.
The second option was that since the professor and the NPP could not have the means to defuse the ultra vires machinery of the incumbent, there was no reasonable need to engage in such an unfair duel, the result of which could have generated a more deeply-rooted nationwide revolt. The best way out for this option was to boycott the parliamentary elections.’’ [ Pages 333-334 of ‘The River in the Sea’ by Akenten Appiah Menka, 2010, Tema.]
Just recall that the secret security committee and its remit were unknown to the party at the time in 1992, and the easy rationalisation for political violence and instability for the sake of power and not Ghana per se. Weigh all that against the invitation of three South African ex-policemen to train security for the 2016 presidential candidate of the same party and related matters in 2016 when a more vibrant, independent and intrusive media is part of the political landscape, and you realise that the more things change, the more they remain the same.
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The views expressed herein in the book, from the vantage of today, were the reactions of a man and a group terrified by the past of military rule even as we were exiting from it, and who were determined to have everybody accept their minutest interpretation of events and personalities no matter how unrealistic and farfetched.
Here we are today, when the PNDC has not only transformed into the NDC, but the NDC itself has undergone serious transformations of character, ideology and direction, and managed to win comfortably four out of the six elections to political office, and some of us still are irretrievably stuck in the past. It would be instructive, rewarding and enlightening to know the finer details of the transformations which occurred in the NPP after the Prof. Adu Boahen leadership which sent the party to power in 2001.
What immediately leaps to the eye is the seizure of the party leadership and direction by those associated with the pointless campaign of 1992 in 2016. The 1992 campaign manager is the 2016 presidential candidate.
The current brouhaha over the Electoral Commission and the voters register has completely overlooked the simple scientific fact that no fingerprints have changed since the current register was compiled, and none will change in the event we are compelled by agitation to have a new one. But we have extremely serious individuals and intellectuals who have happily vacated this scientific fact to push for a new one as part of the push for power this year.
In short, if you stick to the unsuccessful strategy used to confront President Rawlings in 1992 for the 2016 campaign against President Mahama, irrespective of changed terrain and circumstances and personalities, we are looking at the results of 1992 reprised, and nothing more.
aburaepistle@hotmail.com