Undemocratic democrats
The thought of us losing the 2016 elections is frightening and difficult to contemplate. We need to win the elections at all cost,” NPP presidential aspirant, former envoy to the US and Trade Minister in the President Kufuor government, Alan Kyerematen, uttered these extraordinary words last Friday, May 16, 2014, in faraway New York in the United States.
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He was reportedly campaigning to be chosen as the flag bearer of the New Patriotic Party for the 2016 presidential election, and this quotation formed part of his address to party faithful.
Backroom politics
On Monday, senior citizen K.B. Asante’s column in this paper revealed some facts about the backroom politics during the 1979 general election, which drew me to these words by Kyerematen the previous week. Mr Asante revealed in his column that the Popular Front Party (PFP) wanted an agreement with the People’s National Party (PNP) of President Limann to scuttle the second round of the presidential election to facilitate the formation of a so-called national government between the PNP and Victor Owusu’s PFP.
Though Mr Asante carefully avoided mentioning names, it was obvious from his narrative that if that scenario had played out, Victor Owusu of the PFP would have been Vice-President to President Limann rather than Professor J. W. deGraft-Johnson, who, with Dr Limann, had already won the first round by a handsome margin but could not meet the 50 per cent plus one vote threshold for outright victory.
We knew at the time, however, that the PNP was in alliance with William “Pa Willie” Ofori-Atta’s United National Convention (UNC) to deny victory to the PFP, and the palpable rewards of that alliance saw Pa Willie becoming Chairman of the Council of State and Harry Sawyerr becoming a Minister of State in the Limann government, among other appointments.
Two things
Two things, however, struck me when I digested Mr Asante’s words. I was firstly amused by the spectacle of Victor Owusu playing second fiddle to his former minion at the Foreign Affairs Ministry as a Vice-President. In pointing to the fact, there is an extant picture of Dr Limann giving some documents to Victor Owusu as the latter sat by Prime Minister Busia during a state visit to Togo during the second Republic.
Secondly, I was fascinated by the fact that if Mr Asante were to be believed (and of course, there are no reasons to disbelieve him), some things never change for some people in this polity. The import of the national government narrative by Mr Asante is that a sizable majority of the people in the NPP of today and in the past find it difficult to accept that they can be beaten fairly and squarely in any election since 1951 and always seek ways and means of either sharing undeserved power with the winners or delegitimising the victory of their opponents. What else explains the need to share power through a federal system in the run-up to independence in the 1950s, what happened in 1979 and again in 1992?
According to Mr Asante, the whole idea fell through because the presumptive Vice-President, Professor deGraft-Johnson, refused to step down to make way for this to work.
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Lost insight
Sadly enough, by the time Mr Asante’s views were published last Monday, the one person who could have offered all of us some insight into this mindset as it manifested itself right from the beginning of the Fourth Republic passed on. I refer to the death of Mr Paul Victor Obeng, senior Presidential Advisor.
As Presidential Advisor on Governmental Affairs, Mr Obeng was the one who, in 1993, chaired the meetings between the ruling NDC and the opposition NPP after the latter had boycotted the parliamentary elections in 1992, claiming the earlier presidential polls were flawed, leading to the publication of ‘The Stolen Verdict’ by the NPP.
The meetings
The meetings, the brainchild of Kwame Pianim, dubbed, “Doing Business with the Government”, were the result of the realisation in the NPP that it could not wield any influence on the first government of the Fourth Republic if the party had no representatives in Parliament, courtesy their self-inflicted wound of boycott.
An idea that germinated at the time was the formation of a national government with the weight of the NPP in any arrangement to be inferred from the constituencies party leader, Professor Adu-Boahen, had won in the presidential election in November, 1992. This too did not fly, just as in 1979.
Demand for victory
Exactly what would compel the gentle and soft-spoken Alan Kyerematen to demand electoral victory from the gods in 2016 “at all cost?” It certainly requires a congenital political make-up to feel that such zero-sum statements must feature in one’s political rhetoric for one’s ambitions to be taken seriously in our country.
This may be difficult for some people to accept but one learns from both experience and example. If you do not have the military revolutionary background of President Rawlings, certainly the examples of soft non-threatening speechifying exemplified by former Presidents Kufuor, Atta-Mills and current President Mahama are worth studying and imitating as a viable route to the top.
Or we are being promised a campaign of violent speech in the struggle to be the flag bearer of the biggest opposition party? Would such an unsavoury campaign not leach into the general election campaign proper with undesirable results for the country and inevitable defeat for its proponents? In their wake, these would lead to another profitless round of accusations of vote fraud and other supposed ills which drove us to court after the last elections?
I daresay that these utterances are not desirable for our democracy. They demonstrate an inbred refusal to accept electoral defeat, which is a real outcome in all contests.
PV Obeng’s passing
The unexpected passage of PV compelled three NPP leaders to say things which probably justify the zero-sum utterance of Mr Kyeremanten. President Kufuor and his chief of staff, Mr Kwadwo Mpiani, both praised the deceased for being very accommodating and easy to work with, a view that implies that difference in opinion must be a necessary bar to political co-existence.
The tribute by Nana Akufo-Addo, as usual, was as terse as the one he wrote about his Legon contemporary and professional colleague, late President Atta Mills, both friends of his, as he claimed. Compare that to the long piece he penned in memory of Nelson Mandela, late South African President and a non-Ghanaian. We have a long way to go to make our democracy a truly beautiful thing to behold.