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