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…Politics is too serious a matter to be left to politicians – Abraham Lincoln
MONTECRISTO
When armies or states go to battle, it is either they win or lose, or arrange a truce and sign pacts. In the days when borders were contrived on visible landmarks such as mountains, rivers, coasts, lakes and forests, you had the fighting states – victor, loser or both – engaging to review borders, strike alliances or pledge not to fight each other again, based on victory and defeat levels. And, you even had victors carrying away distressed women from the vanquished state.
Combatants, including captains and platoon heads and COs are injured, maimed or, sometimes, even marooned. And you returned scathed, brutally bruised or battered and shattered. That’s what happened in these last elections in which anger and desperation, rather than decency, prevailed.
It is a tale of friendly fires, betrayal and self-inflicted disruptive attitude. Win or lose, there’s always a diary to pen and memoirs to chronicle – as if the NPP, for instance, didn’t know there was a Paa Willie and Victor Owusu fight that split the fortunes of the group in 1979 and gave the game away to the PNP and rejuvenated Okutwer Bekoe team.
In the case of the New Patriotic Party and the leading opposition National Democratic Congress, it has been wars of attrition from 1992 through 2000, 2008 and 2012, to 2016 and 2024.
In 2020, that war of attrition did not manifest in a Mahama Ayariga-Hawa Yakubu fray, but a razor attack on some okro mouth in a Legislature that is gaining notoriety for partisan vibes, instead of bipartisan, Ghana first, inclusive arrangements.
It also manifested in the fight against corruption in which appointees didn’t impress civil society and the people of Ghana. Indeed, from Special Prosecutor Martin Amidu to youthful Kissi Adjebeng, it was one comedy of errors upon another, amplifying the bogusness of the Constitution that has created too many systems and structures that tackle just one crime, among other holes.
Corruption fight
Some of us had thought that Jerry Rawlings’s penchant for fighting corruption would have made what is corruption clear enough for our gatekeepers to nab without much difficulty the perpetrators of the criminal act. That he appointed Acting heads was clear he feared that his own men could be victims of the ‘plot’ to checkmate the opposition.
Enter Emile Short, Philip Archer and the rest, and it turned out – even after democrat JA Kufuor, that fighting corruption is not an African leadership gift. Particularly in British West Africa, it has been a tall order, from Gambia, Sierra Leone, Liberia, to Ghana and Nigeria.
It is, indeed, the same story with debt management, economic management, inflation fight and the odious, intriguing banking sector in which job losses and losses in deposits have combined to brew political intrigue in an economy where, despite the myriads of operators, it is difficult for a worker in a reputable entity taking his salary at Zenith, for instance, to go for a salary advance of three months. And, that is absurd.
I recall the days of the Barclays Bank, (now ABSA)? Ghana Commercial Bank and Standard Chartered when you walked to the Manager if you had a difficulty and, presto, you find redemption. It is different story today, where the banks have moved negatively from decentralisation to centralisation.
Yet, corruption in the sector is fabulous. I won’t cite one bank notorious for the awful record of the Ghana country sector of an otherwise respectable bank on the continent. Not ABSA-Barclays, Stanchart, and not Bank of Africa and First Atlantic…
I don’t know much about what the role of the Central Bank is, in all that. I do know, however, that a central bank’s role is save the government from disgrace – even if it has to borrow and borrow and borrow. A government will always pay back, unlike KK Korkuvi Julor and Co or the General Secretary of the Democratic Patriotic Party.
Formalisation
About 25 years ago, the Africa Development Bank (AfDB) sounded notice to Finance Ministers, Central Bank chiefs and captains of industry as well as governments that Africa, blessed with cheap labour, comprising mainly of youth with abundant energies, need to trigger faster growth. Go ask the politicians how well they took that advice.
Similarly, it (the Africa Development Bank), prescribed formalisation of the economy as in ingredient, in attaining the same goal as is developing critical programmes that enhance skills training for youth. That is aside of programmes that empower women in a digitised space. As I do this piece, tomato traders still credit from the Upper East and Burkina Faso and Mali and abscond, owing to lack of a digitised space.
Spaces on markets are not digitised, largely, otherwise Kinbu in the CBD will not be boiling in traffic with traders leaving the Makola market and pouring into the streets, while hawkers flourish, doing business anywhere, but paying levies nowhere. I have heard it said on several forums that Ghana is always first in policy development, but awful in implementation.
Galamsey
That charge is particularly pertinent in the lingering saga of galamsey where the politicians keep shifting the posts, without making firm commitments or talking policy, in moving the conversation forward.
Intriguing that governments sat down and looked on till dozens of thousands of hectares in preserved arears were ravaged by pickaxes and shovels and, later, Chinese logistics by youth armed to the teeth. We even sat down to watch degradation affect the delectable Lake Bosumtwi.
As for the shores of Ghana from shoreline to shoreline, it has been degradation in metal and plastic as well as human wastes in certain areas that you ask if there are local government agencies in place. Intriguingly, manifestoes of the political parties deal with all these issues. Particularly in the case of the ruling party, therefore, the media would be right sparing no bullets, when a Minister is appointed and communicators deny that this one, too, is not a military thing just like elections monitoring of December 2024. Certainly, undeniably, galamsey cannot be won, without holistic military fight in permanent place.
In Burkina Faso, where I have friends in high places, they tell me they fight militias engaged in subversive activities. Here in Ghana, the inflated human rights activists would ask a soldier to come prove in court that he or she shot the criminal, who is known to hold a gun on him, on the waterbody and not a forest, attending to nature’s call. And, that’s how come we are where we are today.
A couple of years ago, a group claiming to be an NGO from Ghana decided to meddle in the cross-border trade in vegetables in which the Burkina Faso administration invests annually together with CARITAS, the social wing of the Roman Catholic Church, BF. When the home government realised that they had extortionist agenda, they drove them to the Ghana side where laxity is usual, am reliably informed.
Burkina Faso has cautioned its producers to be cautious who they trade with and who they extend credit to, while the military administration looks at sustainable options in digitising the space.
Ghana Peace Council without weapons
In the lead-up to the December 07, presidential and parliamentary elections, the Ghana Peace Council, the Ghana Police Service and the National Commission for Civic Education did what any responsible and serious state institution would do to help build peace before, during and after the general elections.
Well, it would turn out that a Peace Council without a weaponised system to operate in, in the opinion of the troublemakers, was a mere masquerade. It would be a simple case of ‘You make that noise; we respect that, but we won’t take that…We have our own agenda.’
At the end of the day, it was not only chaotic, but that the state lost the argument and lost as well its lawful hold on the space in an awful manner.
Still, am sad
That is the sad story of Election 2024, though a party lost and another won as have been the case in Ghana since 1992, without the country going to war in political colours. Am sad that, though that, between the law or policy, and implementation or outworking of the law, the difference this particular election was as wide as Hamas, Houthi and Hezbollah tunnels in the Middle East.
I say welcome, however, to our new President we have elected to fight all of these ills and stay afloat, without anybody getting angry to want to vote him out soonest.
