“At the end of the day it is our wish that neither major political party gets a nodding largess from popular sovereignty, for Ghanaians deserve a non-establishment political party which has been free from the seismic scandals of public corruption commonly associated with their duopolistic system.
“Looking at the gargantuan scale of public corruption recorded thus far in the contemporary political inventories of both the NPP and the NDC, Ghanaians will be best advised to look elsewhere for salvation.
“This is never about “the devil you know is better than the angel you don’t know.” Rather, it is about the Woyomenomics you know is not better than the Cocainenomics you know!” (Francis Kwarteng, “Will Kufuor Vote for Akufo-Addo,” Ghanaweb, Dec. 7, 2016).
THE MORAL AND POLITICAL CHALLENGE FOR GHANAIANS
Do Ghanaians Really Want Change?
This titular question is as important as ever. It is important because it represents an insightful vista of the stock-still political psychology of the Ghanaian electorate.
In other words, why Ghanaians keep returning the same political criminals to power is difficult to explain.
From the exclusive perspective of the Fourth Republic, which of the two major political parties has added value to the standard of living and quality of life of Ghanaians citizens? Of the state?
Absolutely none.
The Fourth Republic has been plagued by the politics of the belly, prebendalism, crony capitalism, public corruption, idiocracy, technocratic mediocrity, political ethnocentrism, and kleptomaniacal democracy among others.
These elements, in fact, constitute the underlying thrusts of the political philosophies of the two major parties, the New Patriotic Party (NPP) and the National Democratic Party (NDC), regardless of their always laying claim to neo-liberalism and democratic socialism, respectively.
Neo-liberalism and democratic socialism in the Ghanaian body politic are merely different labels for the same idea of political economy—kleptomaniacal democracy. The neocolonial leadership of the Fourth Republic has consistently failed to make any significant impact in the life of the average Ghanaian.
The NPP and the NDC are known for playing political games with the “feeble” minds of Ghanaians, through their respective ideological manufacture of such tendentiously convenient, although empty, labels and rhetoric.
As a matter of fact, neither of these two parties cares for national development or the living conditions of the masses.
From Rawlings, to Kufuor, to Mills, and to Mahama, none did anything worthwhile for the nation and its citizens.
Akufo-Addo will be no different. More particularly so too we have not produced a single progressive, visionary leadership since the birth of the Fourth Republic.
Akufo-Addo is cut from the same stale, morally unimpressionable and dirty cloth of ruling elites. So we will not jubilate as others are doing now! We will wait for four or eight more years for this jubilation assessment. Significantly, until then we see this new day as a day to mourn the future of Ghana.
We know for a fact that Akufo-Addo cannot make Ghana a developed country in a million years because his party, the NPP, and his colleagues in the other party, the NDC, have managed to squander every available opportunity and the vast wealth of the state to the detriment of national development.
The government of which he was an influential member, and a founding member, too, the NPP for that matter, had all the money in the world as well as incontinent Western-Asian patronage, the men and the women, and relatively low debt burden, yet this corrupt government failed to deliver in terms of national development. Not even the standard of life and quality of life of the masses significantly improved.
We are not saying Akufo-Addo is Kufuor or will be Kufuor—far from it, yet it is this same degenerately corrupt NPP-driven government that Akufo-Addo is definitely going to draw philosophical inspiration and political leadership from, not forgetting that the offices of the Attorney General/Foreign Ministry which he, Akufo-Addo, occupied as part of the corrupt Kufuor administration perhaps also happened to qualify as one of the most corrupt in the nation’s political history.
At the end of the day we will not congratulate Akufo-Addo on his landslide victory. We have never done this before for any elected leader in the Fourth Republic and will not break this cherished tradition for the sake of Akufo-Addo. We shall therefore defer any congratulatory message to the enlightened wisdom of the future where, possibly, four or eight years hence, the benefit of hindsight will offer us a wider window into the balance sheet of his legacy.
For now, it is the substance of his political stewardship during the tenure of his presidency and what he can do to improve the living conditions of the masses that should be of utmost interest to us. After all what has congratulatory messages done to improve the standard of living and quality of life of the masses? It is mostly those—his inner circle of family members, political patrons, close friends—who stand to gain from his presidency who should be congratulating him.
Our shameful schadenfreude duopoly has not inured to the benefit of the average Ghanaian.
FOOD FOR THOUGHT
“You can fool some people sometimes, but you can’t fool all the people all the time” (Bob Marley, “Get Up, Stand Up”).
The rejection of the Mahama administration after just one term in office may not necessarily have everything to do with the Ghanaian elector being a discerning political animal.
In other words the electoral coup d’état against the NDC is a subtle or nuanced celebration of the status quo.
For instance, what policy measures are Akufo-Addo and Bawumia going to put in place to prevent the underground cocaine economy from propping the national economy as it did under the Kufuor presidency?
What are Bawumia and Akufo-Addo going to put in place to completely eliminate or minimize cronyism and nepotism from their government, different from or unlike corrupt Kufuor’s government, a government that never counted amongst the best in the world?
The second question is of utmost importance to us because the booming underground cocaine economy under the Kufuor presidency eventually came to play some quantitative and qualitative role in reclassifying Ghana as a Middle Income polity and also as one of the world’s fastest growing economies.
Are they going to continue to “rebase” GDP figures with cooked-up statistical data as happened under both the presidencies of Kufuor and Mahama, just to give the impression that the economy is doing well when it is actually not?
Are they going to move past the cosmetic and grossly unsustainable “achievements” chalked under the Kufuor presidency, of which Bawumia and Akufo-Addo played their parts?
Are Akufo-Addo and Bawumia willing to create a special office for an independent prosecutor who will investigate them, the two of them, investigate and prosecute all those believed to have been involved in serious allegations of political corruption committed during the Kufuor Mahama presidencies?
What specific roles did Akufo-Addo and the leadership of the NPP on the one hand and on the other, President Mahama and the leadership of the NDC actually play in giving away our wealth to foreigners? And if so, finally, how are they going to renegotiate the mineral wealth and gas/oil resources which both the NDC and the NPP have signed away to foreign interest on the cheap?
Akufo-Addo and Bawumia need just 18 months to fulfill their dystopian campaign promises and to turn the Ghanaian economy around, as well as the country into “a land flowing with milk and honey,” a feat none of his Fourth Republic’s predecessors could ever achieve in a billion years.
Not even Moses could have achieved this feat. God did it in his behalf though he never tasted this “land flowing with milk and honey” with his naked eyes.
Nkrumah thought if the masses wanted “milk and sardines” he would not have wasted resources on laying the industrial foundation of Ghana.
There is a noble place in the Guinness World Records for Akufo-Addo nonetheless, if he and Bawamia finally succeed in actualizing this feat, a Sisyphean feat probably unparalleled in the annals of human history.
Unlike most Ghanaians, some of us have eidetic memory. We are not naïve, and we are closely watching! In fact we are cautiously deliberate in intellectual and philosophical outlook as rashness or foolhardiness is not our forte, more so because we do not want to be part of that crumbling world of dystopian non-existence. Campaign promises are far from political realism!
Sadly, the NPP has not even been ushered into political office let alone start implementing its grandiose political campaign promises, and already, as expected, its excited, bloodthirsty members and the disgruntled members of the NDC are fighting amongst themselves and seriously injuring each other. Exacting revenge on each other is a harbinger of worst things to come.
Then again if we seriously think these two wayward, neocolonial parties and their leaderships of schadenfreude bovarists will save Ghana then we better think twice! Our duopolistic dictatorship is an unnecessary drag on national development and social cohesion.
If we truly want to move ahead as a nation on a progressive to industrial revolution, then we must look for a way to circumnavigate this stifling specter of duopolistic parochialism!
CLOSING REMARKS
“The length of a frog can only be determined after its death” (A Ghanaian proverb).
The average Ghanaian elector is not as creatively discerning as some misguided commentators would have some of us believe.
This is largely because he has consistently failed to see beyond the deceptive political plumage of both the NDC and the NPP—spitting images of each other with their translucent political colors.
Then again the so-called discerning Ghanaian elector has consistently failed to see the NDC as unprofessionally incompetent, the NPP as professionally incompetent.
This is seen in the fact that they have all proved to be equally bad managers of the state and of the national economy, since they have never even bothered to stake a claim to the bargaining power of comparative advantage and pragmatic nationalism as part of the motive engine of the development economics of Ghana.
All the fiscal policies—if they even have had any—they have put in place have been operationally cosmetic at best and at worst, unsustainable.
These fiscal policies have mostly revolved around kleptomaniacal neo-liberalism in, kleptomaniacal democratic socialism out, then kleptomaniacal democratic socialism in, kleptomaniacal neo-liberalism out—sort of an unbroken continuum of political and economic leadership which rears its ugly head every four or eight years.
One important question we always want ask is simply this:
Is kleptomaniacal democracy the only contribution that the so-called discerning Ghanaian elector can make to this challenging yet enlightened dispensation of political civilization—of human civilization for that matter?
The Ghanaian election is a mere formality, the rest borders on the seriousness of political corruption. Akufo-Addo and Bawumia know this because their political parties have not been exempt from it—public corruption.
Public corruption is the oxygen Ghanaian politicians breathe in and out on a daily basis. We strongly believe this proverbial narrative is not going to change with the NPP in power.
NPP is the NDC, and vice versa—spitting images of corruption!
It is too premature to acknowledge this “change.” We do not know yet if this “change” is positive or negative since we view both parties, neither of which has demonstrated any capacity for moral agency, as being necessarily the same diabolical enemies of the state, of the masses, of the national interest, and of national development.
Thus we are not expecting to hear a different political tune from these political criminals. We already know how this political tune sounds like—it is a stale tune based on pretentiousness or moral sanctimony.
“Time Will Tell,” sang Bob Marley.
RECOMMENDATION
If Akufo-Addo (and his incoming government) is really serious about developing the country and taking it to the level of industrialization as we see in the special case of China today, say, then he must as well move far away from the intellectual, philosophical, technocratic, and bureaucratic mediocrity of the Kufuor era. This era was an era of unproductive intellectual and philosophical simplicity.
The Kufuor dispensation was a stagnant one in terms of creative ideas, namely one that did not produce scientifically, politically and economically sustainable ideas. That dispensation was a cosmetic one—in other words. Moreover, the 2016 NPP manifesto itself is technocratically anorexic, ideologically anorexic in terms of the implemental fortitude of scientific, technological actuation.
Akufo-Addo (and the likes of Fredie Blay and Kweku Baako, Jr.) cut his teeth on Nkrumahism, perhaps the profoundest scientific philosophy ever produced in the annals of modern ideas. It is the only system of scientific and political thought that can produce the kind of industrial revolution we associate with the West and the emerging economies of the Far East (see David Simon’s “Fifty Key Thinkers on Development” and Robert Woode’s “Third World to First World—By One Touch: Repercussions of the Overthrow of Dr. Kwame Nkrumah”).
No leader in Ghana and Africa today can do without Nkrumah and his progressive ideas as those sustainable ideas of his are, in fact, the very same ideas the sham neo-liberalism of the NPP and the questionable democratic socialism of the NDC have tried to emulate but always failed along the way. Busia could not, so too were/are all those who came after him right up to President Mahama.
We have seen how the NDC and the NDC have sold off Nkrumah-built state assets to sustain the nation. In fact, the minor achievements of both the NDC and the NPP have been mere extensions of the solid foundation Nkrumah laid for Ghana. We are lagging behind the rest of the world because we have simply failed to understand the beautiful mind of the world’s “Africa’s Man of the Millennium.”
The NPP should therefore get its brightest minds together to pore over the following works of monumental scientific, philosophical, mathematical and political profundity (courtesy of Dr. Kofi Kissi Dompere):
Dr. Dompere makes liberal use of some of the profoundest ideas discovered in modern science, economic theory, the science of logic, mathematics, logic, sociology, political science, operations research/management science and so on.
In fine, his rather large corpus of sophisticated economic-cum-mathematical texts and of highly technical peer-reviewed papers has a lot to teach Bawumia and the incoming administration.
We shall return with Part 2.