Kofi Akpabli: Going to war at polling stations
What have machetes, guns, clubs, stones and other offensive weapons got in common with elections?
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None whatsoever except in our part of the world where electing representatives to Parliament could be turned into an act of war. P.W. Botha’s words about the black person should be ringing ceaselessly in our ears.
Having chosen the path of democracy as our system of governance, elections have become mandatory tools we cannot do away with. It is the closest the majority of the people could come to participate in the general administration of the country. It is also an opportunity to make a choice out of the options available.
Since 1992, we have conducted several elections, both major as in general presidential and parliamentary and minor as in by-elections. In all instances, we have registered violence one way or the other. Strangely, it was during by-elections in which the whole country’s attention was drawn to only one constituency that the violence became more prominent.
Ideally, one would have expected that as we gained more experience with time and practice, we would become more enlightened and come to terms with the fact that elections are part and parcel of the democratic process and should be done without any acrimony let alone in an atmosphere of violence.
We have failed miserably in this regard and the leadership of the various political parties should be fully blamed and held responsible for this sad and primitive state of affairs.
As for the verbal assaults and empty promises that characterise political campaigns, they may not desert us for a very long time to come. Some may even say they are some of the ingredients that spice the political game so long as they are done with decency and respect for one another.
The idea is that, once you have an educated and well-informed electorate that understands the issues at stake, all those political tricks at best would only expose one’s weakness and would not bear any positive dividends.
Unfortunately, our case is quite different. We still have a high level of illiteracy which naturally breeds ignorance and so the national interest is lost in the heavy dose of political rhetoric. Personal interest is, therefore, paraded as national interest for which people are prepared to draw blood.
Politics has become a commercial business in which some group of people who find themselves at the helm of national affairs profit immensely while those who fail in their bid suffer the consequences. It is an opportunity to milk the nation’s coffers dry and pillage its resources. This is why our politics has become a do-or-die affair.
Many people have raised issues about it already. They call it winner-takes-all syndrome. That is the present arrangement whereby after elections, the winning party does not only take over the administration of the country, but the management and distribution of its resources determines who gets what according to political affiliation. This is a recipe for disaster.
Secondly, a system which makes it very easy for public officials and their business associates with the tacit connivance of the political establishment to dissipate public funds with impunity is an incentive for people to use every means, fair or foul, to gain political power or to avoid losing the same.
We may condemn what happened at Talensi a week ago but it will not be the end so long as people have insatiable taste for power and the material and monetary wealth it would bring. In other words, once corruption, greed, impunity and self-aggrandisement have become standard practices in our political culture, we should not expect political violence to disappear so soon.
We may blame the police for inaction in such matters but that only means turning a blind eye to the reality on the ground. The head of the police administration, the Inspector General of Police (IGP), is appointed by the President, and he holds that position as long as it suits the President, so as a normal human being who is conscious of his survival instincts, there is a limit to what he/she will do as a form of self-preservation.
I think the best we should do is to use the experience of Talensi and other such incidents to determine how best to insulate certain key state institutions such as the police against executive control at least operationally, so that we do not have excuses for failures in situations such as election violence which has gone on over the years and under different administrations.