Features
A dilemma called Ghana (Part 4)
Ghana’s coat of arms
In this penultimate edition of my five-part series on the above topic, I seek to discuss the road to what has become wrongly termed the Fourth Republic. I make this assertion because Ghana has never been re-colonised since our independence on March 6, 1957, and our republican status in 1960.
I will look at certain landmarks since the 31st December Revolution that brought Jerry Rawlings back into the saddle, this time with a Provisional National Defence Council (PNDC) that ruled for eleven years.
I was on a short holiday in Ghana when 31st December happened and I went through the hassle of chasing an exit permit to be able to fly out of the country. That period saw the harshest hamarttan season I have ever witnessed.
Once again, many Ghanaians supported the return of Rawlings since the PNP administration was bickering within itself instead of focussing on governance. Workers Defence Committees (WDC) and People’s Defence Committees (PDC) were set up to uphold and ensure probity and accountability with revolutionary fervour.
These committees were later to merge as Committees for the Defence of the Revolution (CDR). The CDR were empowered to adjudicate and resolve certain petty litigations. Public Tribunals were set up to fast track legal matters since the courts were considered too slow with justice delivery.
But the Revolution was roundly condemned in the Western media. Nigerian media were vociferous in their condemnation of the situation in Ghana. Their stance was to shift later in 1982, when Rawlings attended an ECOWAS meeting in Lagos. As part of his closing remarks, Rawlings said something to the effect that their deliberations would be meaningless if the conference was just a forum for drinking wine and photo ops and no action was taken.
By that delivery, Rawlings became the darling of the Nigerian media. And that respect has been there to date. No wonder Nigerians kept saying that if we did not want Rawlings, we should send him to them.
However, that country was to deport over a million and a half Ghanaians in 1983. I was reporting on the harrowing experience the deportees were facing in various suburbs of Lagos for the media organisation I was an intern with in that country. Many lost their belongings or gave them away at ridiculously low prices. Some others ran back to Ghana with vehicles belonging to their bosses.
Our compatriots came home to a country that was suffering a devastating drought and bush fires with virtually no food to feed the masses. But the PNDC marshalled a team to get the returnees settled. The National Mobilisation Programme was set up, and that became a rallying point for disaster management.
The Programme was to settle the returnees within 90 days. It later set up Mobisquads that engaged in replanting cocoa plantations burnt by wildfires on a voluntary basis. They were in every corner of the country, helping farmers, and food production was on the mend.
The PNDC encouraged women’s participation in the decision making process. The 31st December Women’s Movement idea, which was originally mooted by the likes of Mrs. Nicol, Cecilia Johnson, Sherry Ayittey, and others, became concretised and put women empowerment on a high pedestal under the presidency of Nana Konadu Agyemang-Rawlings, wife of Jerry Rawlings.
Rawlings’ charisma and bonding with the people were the rallying points for the national drive to change the direction of governance where the people owned their decisions. But dissent was growing both at home and abroad. As the pressure gathered momentum, the PNDC set up a National Commission for Democracy to collect and collate views on the way forward for the country.
The verdict was that Ghana needed a return to constitutional democracy. As a result, a consultative assembly was elected to draft a constitution that was put to the people in a referendum for approval. The 1992 Constitution was, therefore, overwhelmingly endorsed by Ghanaians.
The fact that constitutional democracy was being restored did not mean the PNDC was a failure. Road infrastructure, schools, health facilities, and some industries were improved to appreciable levels, thanks to Rawlings’ personal hands-on approach to leadership. Professionalism was injected into the Armed Forces, which to a large extent won them the respect they had lost under the SMC regimes.
Many political parties sprang up for Election 1992. The actors of the PNDC formed the National Democratic Congress (NDC), Nkrumah’s CPP was splintered into many parties and the Progress Party became the New Patriotic Party (NPP). Rawlings won the presidential election as the NDC candidate against the NPP’s Prof. Albert Adu Boahen. Not satisfied with the result, the NPP boycotted the parliamentary vote.
The NDC again won the general elections in 1996 with the NPP entering Parliament this time. Constitutional democracy was working for Ghana. With this came many structural reforms in education, the judiciary, commerce, and health delivery.
The revolutionary verve was receding as government policies were scrutinised and dissected by the opposition and the media. Though Rawlings’s charisma was intact, democratic protocols impeded his free-spirited leadership style. Ordinary people’s access to him was restricted. Though he found a way to break protocol occasionally, it was very few and far between.
Election 2000 saw the NPP win under the leadership of Mr. John Agyekum Kufuor. The campaign was toxic, with the NPP accusing the NDC of corruption and lacking the economic savvy to continue in power. The NDC, on the other hand, pointed to the political antecedents of the tribalistic divisiveness of the NPP.
The NPP declared Ghana a highly indebted poor country (HIPC), a situation that made lending countries forgive the country’s debts. It allowed for more inflows of cash and grants. The cedi was re-denominated with three zeroes yanked off. A thousand cedis then became One Ghana Cedi. It is instructive that even today, some Ghanaians refer to the cedi in the old terms. A hundred cedis is still One Million, isn’t it?
Professor John Evans Atta Mills, the NDC candidate and who was Rawlings’ Vice President, took the electoral loss in stride and bided his time. He lost again to Kufuor in 2004. With campaign messages of corruption and nepotism against the Kufuor administration, the NDC took the electoral fight to the NPP.=
The HIPC idea had lost steam, and the government took the country out of the programme and began a new journey into the international borrowing market. Prof. John Evans Atta Mills, with John Dramani Mahama as running mate, won Election 2008 against the NPP’s Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo.
I recall a private chat he had with me after I interviewed him at the NDC congress at the University of Ghana in 2006. Prof. Mills told me why he wanted to be president. He said, “My brother, as humans, we must abhor greed and selfishness in public office. Birds sing without seeking an audience. Flowers give out fragrances, asking for nothing in return. Trees take carbon dioxide and give us oxygen, but only humans have the propensity to cheat nature and their fellow humans. This must stop.”
Prof. Mills epitomised what the import of his chat with me portrayed throughout his time as President. A deeply religious man, he did not shy away from holding occasional prayer sessions at the presidency, to the chagrin of the opposition. He was visibly furious with state institutions whose staff condoned acts of corruption.
In spite of his health concerns, Atta Mills was on top of national issues until his sudden death on July 24, 2012, at age 68. I was in New York when my daughter called to inform me. At JFK that evening, other passengers on our flight to Accra got to know as I was discussing the sad situation with a classmate of the late President.
John Dramani Mahama was to be sworn in as President that evening in accordance with constitutional provisions.
By Dr Akofa K. Segbefia
Writer’s email address:
akofa45@yahoo.com
Features
Tears of Ghanaman, home and abroad
The typical native of Sikaman is by nature a hospitable creature, a social animal with a big heart, a soul full of the milk of earthly goodness, and a spirit too loving for its own comfort.
Ghanaman hosts a foreign pal and he spends a fortune to make him very happy and comfortable-good food, clean booze, excellent accommodation and a woman for the night.
Sometimes the pal leaves without saying a “thank you but Ghanaman is not offended. He’d host another idiot even more splendidly. His nature is warm, his spirit benevolent. That is the typical Ghanaian and no wonder that many African-Americans say, “If you haven’t visited Ghana. Then you’ve not come to Africa.
You can even enter the country without a passport and a visa and you’ll be welcomed with a pot of palm wine.
If Ghanaman wants to go abroad, especially to an European country or the United States, it is often after an ordeal.
He has to doze in a queue at dawn at the embassy for days and if he is lucky to get through to being interviewed, he is confronted by someone who claims he or she has the power of discerning truth from lie.
In short Ghanaman must undergo a lie-detector test and has to answer questions that are either nonsensical or have no relevance to the trip at hand. When Joseph Kwame Korkorti wanted a visa to an European country, the attache studied Korkorti’s nose for a while and pronounced judgment.
“The way I see you, you won’t return to Ghana if I allow you to go. Korkorti nearly dislocated her jaw; Kwasiasem akwaakwa. In any case what had Korkorti’s nose got to do with the trip?
If Ghanaman, after several attempts, manages to get the visa and lands in the whiteman’s land, he is seen as another monkey uptown, a new arrival of a degenerate ape coming to invade civilized society. He is sneered at, mocked at and avoided like a plague. Some landlords abroad will not hire their rooms to blacks because they feel their presence in itself is bad business.
When a Sikaman publisher landed overseas and was riding in a public bus, an urchin who had the impudence and notoriety of a dead cockroach told his colleagues he was sure the black man had a tail which he was hiding in his pair of trousers. He didn’t end there. He said he was in fact going to pull out the tail for everyone to see.
True to his word he went and put his hand into the backside of the bewildered publisher, intent on grabbing his imaginary tail and pulling it out. It took a lot of patience on the part of the publisher to avert murder. He practically pinned the white miscreant on the floor by the neck and only let go when others intervene. Next time too…
The way we treat our foreign guests in comparison with the way they treat us is polar contrasting-two disparate extremes, one totally incomparable to the other. They hound us for immigration papers, deport us for overstaying and skinheads either target homes to perpetrate mayhem or attack black immigrants to gratify their racial madness
When these same people come here we accept them even more hospitably than our own kin. They enter without visas, overstay, impregnate our women and run away.
About half of foreigners in this country do not have valid resident permits and was not a bother until recently when fire was put under the buttocks of the Immigration Service
In fact, until recently I never knew Sikaman had an Immigration Service. The problem is that although their staff look resplendent in their green outfit, you never really see them anywhere. You’d think they are hidden from the public eye.
The first time I saw a group of them walking somewhere, I nearly mistook them for some sixth-form going to the library. Their ladies are pretty though.
So after all, Sikaman has an Immigration Service which I hear is now alert 24 hours a day tracking down illegal aliens and making sure they bound the exit via Kotoka International. A pat on their shoulder.
I am glad the Interior Ministry has also realised that the country has been too slack about who goes out or comes into Sikaman.
Now the Ministry has warned foreigners not to take the country’s commitment to its obligations under the various conditions as a sign of weakness or a source for the abuse of her hospitality.
“Ghana will not tolerate any such abuse,” Nii Okaija Adamafio, the Interior Minister said, baring his teeth and twitching his little moustache. He was inaugurating the Ghana Refugee and Immigration Service Boards.
He said some foreigners come in as tourists, investors, consultants, skilled workers or refugees. Others come as ‘charlatans, adventurers or plain criminals. “
Yes, there are many criminals among them. Our courts have tried a good number of them for fraud and misconduct.
It is time we welcome only those who would come and invest or tour and go back peacefully and not those whose criminal intentions are well-hidden but get exposed in due course of time.
This article was first published on Saturday March 14, 1998
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Features
Decisions have consequences
In this world, it is always important to recognise that every action or decision taken, has consequences.
It can result in something good or bad, depending on the quality of the decision, that is, the factors that were taken into account in the decision making.
The problem with a bad decision is that, in some instances, there is no opportunity to correct the result even though you have regretted the decision, which resulted in the unpleasant outcome.
This is what a friend of mine refers to as having regretted an unregretable regret. After church last Sunday, I was watching a programme on TV and a young lady was sharing with the host, how a bad decision she took, had affected her life immensely and adversely.
She narrated how she met a Caucasian and she got married to him. The white man arranged for her to join him after the marriage and processes were initiated for her to join her husband in UK. It took a while for the requisite documentation to be procured and during this period, she took a decision that has haunted her till date.
According to her narration, she met a man, a Ghanaian, who she started dating, even though she was a married woman.
After a while her documents were ready and so she left to join her husband abroad without breaking off the unholy relationship with the man from Ghana.
After she got to UK, this man from Ghana, kept pressuring her to leave the white man and return to him in Ghana. The white man at some point became a bit suspicious and asked about who she has been talking on the phone with for long spells, and she lied to him that it was her cousin.
Then comes the shocker. After the man from Ghana had sweet talked her continuously for a while, she decided to leave her husband and return to Ghana after only three weeks abroad.
She said, she asked the guy to swear to her that he would take care of both her and her mother and the guy swore to take good care of her and her mother as well as rent a 3-bedroom flat for her. She then took the decision to leave her husband and return to Ghana.
She told her mum that she was returning to Ghana to marry the guy in Ghana. According to her, her mother vigorously disagreed with her decision and wept.
She further added that her mum told her brother and they told her that they were going to tell her husband about her intentions.
According to her, she threatened that if they called her husband to inform him, then she would commit suicide, an idea given to her by the boyfriend in Ghana.
Her mum and brother afraid of what she might do, agreed not to tell her husband. She then told her husband that she was returning to Ghana to attend her Grandmother’s funeral.
The husband could not understand why she wanted to go back to Ghana after only three weeks stay so she had to lie that in their tradition, grandchildren are required to be present when the grandmother dies and is to be buried.
She returned to Ghana; the flat turns into a chamber and hall accommodation, the promise to take care of her mother does not materialise and generally she ends up furnishing the accommodation herself. All the promises given her by her boyfriend, turned out to be just mere words.
A phone the husband gave her, she left behind in UK out of guilty conscience knowing she was never coming back to UK.
Through that phone and social media, the husband found out about his boyfriend and that was the end of her marriage.
Meanwhile, things have gone awry here in Ghana and she had regretted and at a point in her narration, was trying desperately to hold back tears. Decisions indeed have consequences.
NB: ‘CHANGE KOTOKA INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT TO KOFI BAAKO INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT’
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