‘Won gbo’ or ‘Kume Preko’ reloaded!
Two days ago, under the auspices of the opposition New Patriotic Party (NPP), a huge demonstration was held in Accra by party members and sympathisers through the main commercial streets of the city.
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This demonstration was called to express frustration and dissatisfaction with the power supply situation in the country which had inaugurated an electricity load-shedding regime throughout the whole country in the past months. Load shedding has affected both domestic and non-domestic consumers of electrical power to a very high degree of discomfort, slowed down industrial productivity and altered business planning generally.
In short, the phenomenon known as ‘’Dumsor’’ affects all and sundry equally, including even those with generators whose noisy appliances are not only a drain on their resources through fuel purchases, but a source of annoying noise pollution in the cities and towns of the country.
Political motives
Of course, the entire blame for this situation has been heaped on the President, his government and his party thus politicising it beyond reprieve. Since the provision of energy on a mass scale is a highly technical undertaking, I will restrict myself today to the politics behind the factors that led to last Wednesday’s demonstration, and associated issues, hence my recollection of a similar demonstration 20 years ago by the same NPP also then in opposition at the time in May, 1995.
The 1995 demonstration on May 11 was truly massive and the biggest show of popular opinion in this country. I was part of that demonstration called principally to protest the new tax regime of the Value Added Tax, VAT, by the government of President Rawlings at the time. Whereas descriptions and estimates of Wednesday’s Won gbo vary, the Kume Preko showing was easily put at more than 500,000 participants and more by all commentators. Again, just like Wednesday’s Won gbo, other associated ills of the government were added to the causes for the demonstration 20 years ago.
In some respects, however, the 2015 event was markedly different from that of 1995. The latter was organised and led by a cross-party set of leaders called the Alliance For Change (AFC) and was intended to compel the opposition parties who had willingly boycotted parliamentary representation for their members courtesy the boycott of the December 1992 parliamentary elections. This decision was taken presumably because President Rawlings had won the first presidential election in November 1992 under fraudulent means. The belief of fraud and rigging resulted in the publication of the book ‘’The Stolen Verdict’’ by the NPP to capture what, in the party’s opinion, enabled the NDC of President Rawlings to win the election.
As fate would have it, the leader or spokesperson for the AFC was Nana Akufo-Addo, and he also led the group of NPP members who authored ‘The Stolen Verdict.’ It is thus patently logical to conclude that the 1995 episode was simply an attempt to revive the fortunes of the opposition who have boycotted institutional participation in democratic, constitutional rule because victory eluded them in the 1992 elections. It is possible to argue that if Kume Preko and associated events were not to have taken place, the NPP would have seriously disabled and weakened itself as a viable opposition in this country. The vim that went into Kume Preko derived from that, and the plain fact that the acknowledged charisma of President Rawlings hung like a colossus on the political landscape of Ghana at the time.
But the 2015 event was called for, organised and led by the NPP. The NPP had gained credibility and won two elections since then, but also lost two elections after, implying the spectre of irrelevance that was self-inflicted after the 1992 polls, especially after the condign defeat of the novel election petition.
Forget about the power crisis and mismanagement of the economy. Mismanagement of the economy can be used to attack every government in the world at any time, irrespective of who is running affairs of state; any and every country, from the least to the most developed. And political rivals can make things appear so bad as to require an immediate change in which the immediate beneficiaries would be those complaining. It is an age-old matter of political struggle everywhere.
The comparison with Kume Preko falters at several other critical junctures. The VAT was withdrawn, repackaged and sold successfully to all Ghanaians, to the ironic situation where the NPP raised the VAT ceiling from 10 per cent to 15 per cent without a twinge of conscience when it assumed power in 2001. The advocacy of and the successful creation of an alliance of all the minority parties led to the utterly absurd selection of the sitting Vice-President, the late Kow Arkaah, as the running mate of then plain John Agyekum Kufuor for the December 1996 presidential polls. It was propagated widely as the height of political wisdom, as sheer hunger for political power was driving many decisions in the ranks of the opposition at the time.
The dexterity and flexibility of the NDC at the time portrayed the party as a potent force in Ghanaian politics. The party brought in Professor Atta Mills to partner President Rawlings to face off John Kufuor and Kow Arkaah for the 1996 elections. On hindsight, the result should have been predictable; President Rawlings repeated his victory of 1992 without a sweat. Nothing so far proves that the NDC does not learn from history.
Relevance
The relevance of the above to this year’s demonstration is that no alternatives can be better than what is already on the table as far as the power deficit situation is concerned.
The only untried expedient is identifying specific technocrats in the power sector and dismissing them from office. Not even the NPP can suggest this.
The enemy of the methods in use by this government is not the wisdom inherent in the methods or lack of it, but time. This is the entire crux of the political relevance of the load shedding we are experiencing.
There has been a side debate on the alteration of routes used by the demonstrators. This is also an old hat that compels us to agree with American President Truman that the only thing new in the world is the history you don’t know. There was a route alteration in the march of the ex-servicemen during the February 28, 1948 disturbances that led to the death of three of them at the Christianborg crossroads; which happened again during Kume Preko 20 years ago. It is all there, in the hallowed Lord Aiken-Watson Report of 1948.
The more things change, the more they stay the same.
aburaepistle@hotmail