Winner-takes-all not inimical to national unity!
It is with great sadness that today I write to disagree with my own beloved Daily Graphic. But it has become imperative and crucial that I speak my mind on this issue.
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I was completely taken aback by the content of the Graphic editorial of last Wednesday, April 30, 2014. I could not believe that my beloved Graphic had also fallen for the fashionable but indefensible plea from some curious academic, intellectual and civil society quarters that the bedrock of our political system, that is, a competition of ideas in a free society, was now a problem that threatened our very existence as a nation.
Of course, I realised the paper was one of the sponsors of the new-fangled National Interest Dialogue being promoted by Dr Emmanuel Akwetey’s Institute for Democratic Governance (IDEG). Perhaps the editorial was to give the needed fillip to a programme of democratic re-engineering that IDEG seemed to be promoting.
Notwithstanding, I totally and completely disagree with the contrived opposition to the logical effects of the political system the people of this country have freely chosen to conduct their affairs since 1992.
Some of us have made a career out of seeing a problem where there is none, of ‘problematising’ each and every phenomenon in the political system, of crying wolf when sheep are peacefully grazing and striving hard to make a hell out of our political circumstances.
The direct inference of our refusal to allow an elected government to work with those who the President wants to carry out the policies and programmes for which the government was elected in the first place is what I understand by this call to abandon the winner-takes-all politics, whatever that hackneyed phrase is supposed to mean.
There is no political system anywhere in the world without parties, factions, groupings, sects and interests. This applies, even more strangely enough, in one-party states more than in multi-party dispensations. The victory of any person implies the preeminence of the party, faction or group that he represents.
If I were Lawyer Sam Okudzeto, to cite an example, I would have resigned as the Director of the Bank of Ghana Board as soon as the people of this country elected into office a party whose ideals I do not share, rather than take the President to court for removing me from office.
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I would have considered it my patriotic duty to give my President, whoever he may be, the space and time to implement his policies and with people he prefers, rather than be a stumbling block leaning on the same constitution to foul up the mandate freely given.
I think the IDEG folks have only succeeded in providing a platform for meaningless and dangerous political statements which must be rejected by all of us. The competition of ideas and personnel is the foundation of the democracy we now practice and have practiced for the past 22 years.
Whatever the problems we find along the way, the basic document prescribes the method of amending our ways and correcting our mistakes.
As I write, there is an ongoing process to amend portions of this document, a process to which many of those who took part in the dialogue have contributed copiously.
The question that begs to be asked is whether these so-called civil society pressure groups represent a genuine constituency of voters in this country or are promoting the interests of their sponsors?
Who has been excluded by positive law or regulation from active participation in our political system? Where in the world does a president with a clear mandate to govern ask others to dilute his vision that voters bought into by voting him into office?
Who are the political opponents who have been excluded, and how should they be included? Co-presidents? Co-ministers? Co-district chief executives or what?
Exactly what does Dr Akwetey mean by “weakened national cohesion”? How is national cohesion defined? And what do the nations which cohere do in unison? If he does not know, it is war that brings the cohesion he preaches. And where in the world are politicians not self-serving or partisan? What was so wrong with past elections that we need reforms before a cataclysm befalls us in 2016? We are attacking institutions of state as if they are filled with aliens and not Ghanaians.
I refuse the invitation to be tagged partisan when it is noted that such alarms are raised only when certain people and their groupings are out of favour with the electorate.
Is it because there is a solid historical precedence for such a behaviour in this Republic? That period was from circa 1954 to 1964 when the one-party state was declared after a referendum to that effect was held.
We willfully forget that some of us can be held equally responsible for how things turn out in the end. I can understand the opposition to the Preventive Detention Act but I cannot accept wanton bombings of our government.
When everybody and every idea from the government are considered bad, when nothing that is being done meets the approval of some of us, we are consciously driving our leaders to finding ways of controlling and curtailing our freedoms.
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Patience is not only a moral virtue but a political imperative in a democratic dispensation. Creating chaos out of order never benefitted the originators of disquiet. The government we have right now is the product of the free and unforced exercise of the political will of the people of this country and, when challenged, affirmed by the Supreme Court last August. The government is a creation of our Fourth Republican Constitution, which has been the longest-enduring of such documents in our history as an independent nation.
The constitution has created for us, with our fulsome consent procured in a referendum in April 1992, a government of the people, for the people and by the people. Any other contrivance is unacceptable in the face of our peculiar history. That is the way it should be.