Of crime, punishment and politics!
Last Tuesday, our government took the first step in the legal tools available to it in the long-running GYEEDA episode over the constant complaints by some of us about corruption in public affairs. The contracts for the programmes entered into by GYEEDA with identified private companies were all abrogated, obviously as the first step to institutional restructuring, recovery, blacklisting and possible prosecution of those responsible for the huge leakages in the public purse.
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As may be imagined and predicted with monotonous regularity in the politics of our time, this announcement was met with skepticism by the very people who had been calling for some actions on this matter for nearly a year now since a portion of a draft report on GYEEDA was made public. From this initial reaction, it must be clear to all of us that some of us are just groping for anything to belittle the efforts of the government to confront and manage the canker of corruption in governance.
This is because in the evening of the same Tuesday, I distinctly heard one of us say on radio that the government faces the threat of huge future judgement debts if the sanctioned companies and entities are minded to seek redress in the courts for the illegal cancellation of contractual obligations by the government. But was the cancellation not provoked by non-performance in the first place?
How is this fantastic turnaround in the fight against corruption possible? Are we really that serious when we decry the incidence of corruption in public affairs when these strange views also form part of the common discourse? Are we suggesting by this rather unwise opinion, taking into account the public outcry about the dubious origins of judgement debts, that our proclaimed opposition to corruption is all noise and fury, signifying nothing?
The current confusion in the breasts of some of us regarding the acceptable or agreed ends in the general condemnation and fight against corruption is not merely post-shifting.
I believe it is an evidence of a rather generalised confusion about what the opposition to this government ought to do to satisfy their purely partisan demands. Those demands can be summed up in one sentence: quit office and hand over to us.
Nothing that is happening now can be separated from a campaign to paint the country as politically unstable, economically vulnerable and socially unbalanced.
Mark well that each of the external indices of economic performance and malfeasance in governance in recent years had all recorded marked improvements over past performances.
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This is quite different from saying that Ghana is a haven and we need not improve upon what we are doing. The agenda-setting is to create a state of despondency about the present and future, enabling and legitimising thoughts of change, some even in a revolutionary manner.
I say so because the situation since 2009 can be likened to what happened after the 1992 elections right up to the 1996 elections.
A presidential election that the NPP religiously believed it would win hands down turned out to be a huge humiliation as President Rawlings won handily in nine regions out of ten, forcing the NPP to boycott the parliamentary poll held a month later amidst strident claims of a rigged vote.
The Stolen Verdict was published, but its usefulness as the template for legal redress was destroyed by the public statement that the judges appointed by President Rawlings to the Supreme Court could not be trusted to deliver justice to the NPP.
The party then sought to do business with the legally-elected government, but nothing came out of it. Then the ‘Kume Preko’ demonstrations followed in 1995 to protest the introduction of the VAT which later formed the basis for far-reaching social legislation by President Kufuor from 2001.
The same 1995 saw the germination of the idea of an alliance of all the minority parties to face the monolithic NDC in 1996. The confidence that the alliance concept generated was so deep-seated that a list of persons to hold office after the electoral victory was published right down to even the district chief executive level, shared liberally among the contracting parties.
In the event, then candidate plain, Mr Kufuor, was defeated in the 1996 poll, though he did better than Professor Adu Boahen in 1992.
We are seeing today the fruits of the search for credible politics to discredit and delegitimise everything that the government is doing or planning to do in the unending quest to create an atmosphere of unease that can lead to victory in the next election.
Unfortunately for our friends who see nothing good in the government, the biggest and most effective symbol of the unattractiveness of the NDC was President Rawlings who has never been on the ballot since 2000 and whose usefulness as a lightning-rod for organising neutral opinion to back the NPP has reduced to the point of irrelevance.
This means that the NDC has moved on, come into its own and doing very well electorally as our friends are caught in a self-imposed time warp full of unfathomable, non-existent threats to our human and property rights and our general wellbeing.
This indeed, yet ironically, is the biggest tribute that is properly owed to the long tenure of the much-derided President Rawlings, the upshot of which was the astonishing pilgrimage to him days before the last election by the NPP leadership to seek political regeneration in the age-old fight for accountability and probity in public life!
The game for our friends has not changed and will not till those who believe themselves superior gain political power. To date, they have not provided a single alternative to the problems they have identified, except raising the anxiety level of harassed citizens.
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It was the well known Ghanaian criminologist who suggested in the time of President Kufuor that it is better to concentrate on recovering misused public resources than seeking to jail the perpetrators of white-collar crime, since naming and shaming them is enough rather than custodial judgements that may end without convicts ever making restitution of misappropriated funds. What has changed?
The NDC has learnt that the shooting range and the public tribunals are not the answer to fighting corruption, but our friends still don’t appreciate that jailing Kwame Peprah and Tsatsu Tsikata after show trials do not win elections nor end corruption.
Let our history be our guide.