Sunday,
June 3, 2012
Whether by his
own design or through an accident of Fate, former President Rawlings is really
ill-at-ease—and with his wife in tow, he is suffering the pang!
We are told that
he spoke “in a characteristic passionate manner” at the 33rd anniversary
celebration of the June 4 Uprising in Aflao, Volta Region, saying that “the NDC
has run itself into a ditch and cannot beat their opponents NPP in the upcoming
elections if the ideals of the June 4 uprisings have been abandoned”
(Myjoyonline, June 3, 2012).
Two
questions immediately emerge: The NDC has run itself into a ditch, leaving the
Rawlingses unscathed? How did that happen? One might ask further: Being the
blind leading a blind party, can the party alone fall into the ditch without
them?
Rawlings and
those thinking like him may think that the NDC has fallen into the ditch and
can’t defeat its arch rival the NPP at Election 2012. To me, however, that’s
not the issue at stake as far as the ongoing internal wranglings or the party’s
electoral fate is concerned. So weighed down by the negative politics going on
within it, the NDC’s future viability may be at stake; but there is more to
this problem.
The real issue
is that it is the Rawlingses who have fallen into the ditch, dragging the party
along with them. Indeed, from all that has been going on ever since they
decided to lock horns with President Mills and all those not in favour of their
political excesses, one can tell that their political edifice has fallen apart
and its centre cannot hold anymore. That is what they fear now and are hiding
behind this “ditch” metaphor to portray.
The long and
short of Rawlings’s “booming” is that he is part of the problem for the party.
The NDC’s place in the ditch has long been created and secured by Rawlings the
very moment he decided to set himself and his office up as a parallel
administration to undermine the legal authority that the Ghanaian electorate
mandated to rule the country after the 2008 general elections.
Wrongly setting
himself up as the paragon of purity and saintliness in Ghanaian politics,
Rawlings has refused to listen to reason and hasn’t deemed it fit to abandon
the collision course on which he has pushed himself all this while. The
question, then, is: Can the NDC be in the ditch without him? He is right in
there too, if he cares to know, and won’t redeem himself just because he thinks
it is only the part that is buried down there. He can’t extricate his fate from
that of the party.
If the party
loses the upcoming elections to the NPP, it will have two options: to remain in
that ditch with the Rawlingses or to lend itself to rebuilding. The latter will
be as arduous a task as to spell the party’s doom all the more because those
not in the Rawlings camp will definitely find their way out to join other
parties.
An emaciated NDC
at this level can’t command any respect or support from an electorate that is privy
to the machinations of the Rawlingses to bring the party to its knees. And for
how long will Nature look on for the Rawlingses to rebuild such a party? It is
a bad omen for them.
Probably, they
might have seen the writing on the wall; hence, their inability to form and
announce a new political party as some observers had anticipated. For as long
as they push the NDC further into the ditch, so will their own plight worsen.
Behaving for us to know how their own fate is tied to the NDC, they need to
know that they are stuck in the ditch as well. The only option they have to
redeem themselves is not to continue to dig in but to work for their own
salvation with fear and trembling.
They have only
one option at this time, which is to recant and retrace their footsteps to the
very point of bifurcation from where they strayed into the political ditch.
Then, they can start all over again, making peace with all those who matter in
the party.
Doing so will
regain for them the goodwill and respect that they have lost. But considering
matters closely, it seems they can’t choose this path. They are so full of
their own self-righteousness that they won’t budge to any entreaties to make
peace. Such characters will be more motivated to continue on the path of
self-destruction than heed good counsel to hasten slowly.
What are the
ideals of June 4 that they are talking about? Nothing but the old, tired, and
worn-out mantra of “probity and accountability” that has become nothing but a
smokescreen behind which they hide to foment trouble. Let’s assume that such
principles are even tenable under our democratic dispensation and that one
should expect them to be upheld as the rules of the game to be applied. Can
Rawlings and his wife tell the whole world that they will pass their own test?
Many happenings
concerning their lifestyle and deeds raise serious questions about them. Here
are just two instances to remind them of their shortcomings. In the Kufuor
government’s handling of matters concerning Rawlings’ “gratuity,” we heard
complaints from Rawlings that the government had once deposited about 665 million
Cedis into his account without explaining to him where that money was coming
from.
As is usual of
him to court public sympathy, Rawlings loudly presented the matter as an
attempt to bribe him and acted for the whole world to see the “saint” in him.
But do you know what happened thereafter? Rawlings withdrew all that money for
use on the quiet. No one heard any complaint from him anymore. Is this a mark
of sincerity from someone blowing the horn on probity and accountability?
Again, let’s
consider the divestiture of state-owned enterprises by the Agbodo Divestiture
Implementation Committee and the circumstances under which the Nsawam Cannery
ended up in the hands of Nana Konadu Agyemang-Rawlings and her 31st
December Women’s Movement. If there was nothing fishy in this matter, why would
Nana Konadu and all the others associated with the divestiture of this enterprise
be put before court on charges related to corruption and malfeasance?
But for the
political interference from Kufuor, the case would have been successfully
prosecuted to put Nana Konadu where she rightfully belonged—in the cooler. Had
that happened, she and her husband would
have known better how to approach anything they perceive as infringing the June
4 principles of probity and accountability.
We want to place
it on record here that attempts by Rawlings to stamp out corruption in Ghana
were cosmetic and motivated by hatred for those perceived as successful in
private business or using their political connections to make it in life.
The activities
of the Citizens’ Vetting Committee in the heady days of the December 31, 1981,
putsch revealed the extent to which such successful people were targeted and
stringently dealt with, resulting in the prosecution and jailing of some by the
Public Tribunals, the confiscation of assets at random, and the deprivation of
many others of their hard-won economic independence and lives.
We are even not
talking about the trumped-up charges that led to the shooting to death of
former Army Generals and many others in the 100 days of the AFRC who were
subjected to a so-called “unprecedented revolutionary action.” In the mad rush
to fight bribery and corruption, Rawlings forgot that such a vice couldn’t be
fought with the tool at his disposal—pure hatred and physical punishment to be
inflicted on suspected culprits. Such an approach left its ugly scars on the body
politic but didn’t solve the problem.
The inescapable
point is that while Rawlings was fighting those targeted as economic saboteurs
or corrupt people in business, happenings in his own government indicated the
extent to which bribery and corruption had taken hold of his appointees. And he
stood by, stupefied by the scourge.
Major Adutu,
then Chairman of the Citizens’ Vetting Committee, for instance, was bitten by
that virus of bribery and corruption. The findings of the CHRAJ against some of
the Rawlings appointees such as Col. Emmanuel Osei-Wusu, P.V. Obeng, Isaac K. Adjei-Maafo,
and Ibrahim Adam (presumably all of whom were staunch apostles of probity and
accountability) revealed to us the rot in the Rawlings government itself; but
who had the power to lift any finger against them? How did Rawlings tackle them
to prove that his government was indeed firmly planted on probity and
accountability?
You see, the
very principles that the Rawlingses are touting here-and-there as being
violated under the Kufuor or Mills governments got violated long ago while the
Grand Master himself was in charge of affairs. Corruption in Ghana can’t be
done away with overnight or on the spur-of-the-moment as Rawlings is wont to do.
Neither can it be fought with mere political posturing or shouting of empty and
worn-out slogans.
Being an endemic
problem, bribery and corruption can’t be fought with cosmetic but brutal
measures as Rawlings sought to do when he was in power. That is why it has
persisted and even fossilized to date. It can be fought by better means which
none of those in authority, including Rawlings himself, has the strength of
character to devise.
The vice can’t
be fought with a “strongman” mentality or through half-hearted and arm-twisting
attempts, no matter how drastic such measures might be. If they could be solved
that way, the killing of the former military generals in 1979 and the long
prison sentences handed down to others would have deterred Ghanaians from
indulging in them. But they haven’t, which means that the real solution lies
elsewhere.
The most potent
means lies in the institutions of state, especially the law-enforcement
agencies and the willingness of the citizenry to collaborate with them. In
Ghana, where the government is more interested in weakening those institutions
than retooling and strengthening them to solve problems, who will be so myopic
as to think that in their present state, they can tackle such heavy responsibilities
as entrusted to them?
It is not as if
such institutions and the people working therein are immune to the vice. It is
common knowledge that bribery and corruption is the second name of all those
state institutions, especially the Ghana Police Service, the Ministries,
Departments, and Agencies. Who shuns bribery and corruption in such institutions?
And in this squalor, which of these institutions can fight the very vice that
clothes it?
The Rawlingses
might be happy to have lived to celebrate the 33rd anniversary of
the June 4 Uprising but it is a celebration that foreshadows a sad end to their
political lives. It is a harbinger for them to seriously ponder to know how to make
amends. It is not too late for them to stretch out their arms to be lifted from
the ditch before they lose steam and resign themselves to a sad fate.
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