Is The Gambia crisis of today mere equalisation politics in Ghana?
This strange title for my musings today actually captures in a nutshell, the rolling story of political post-election violence in Ghana and its tentacles in our body politic,
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as well as the other rolling but international story of the creeping instability in The Gambia in which we are involved not only as colleague ECOWAS members reportedly contributing troops to an armed resolution, but also a fellow Commonwealth country with shared colonial history and links to the United Kingdom.
Let me deal with The Gambia first and ECOWAS matters and their connection to recent Ghanaian politics. It was a similar situation in neighbouring Cote D’Ivoire which the late President Mills said famously “dzi wo fie asem,’’ to wit, “mind your own business,’’ when then opposition leader the then plain Honourable Nana Akufo-Addo was hounding the former’s government for inaction and lack of engaged participation in the Ivorian affair. Later on, after this episode, Professor Kwesi Yankah then Pro-Vice Chancellor at the University of Ghana, gave a hilarious lecture with the same title at the British Council Hall.
To be fair to the facts, the President Mills’ repartee was in reaction to a question asked by a journalist at a press conference, and not a direct statement made in reaction to President Nana Akufo-Addo at the time. At the time, most Ghanaians did not even know that Ghanaian troops were already on the ground in Abidjan providing protection to the person who was eventually installed as the Ivorian President, Allasane Dramani Ouattarra, all as part of an ECOWAS\AU\UN roadmap.
Now of course President Ouattarra was the guest of honour at the swearing-in of our own President, the very same Nana Akufo-Addo, just two weeks ago. At the moment, he is battling and dealing with a mutiny of his soldiers over spillover matters from the civil war in that country, also the result of contested elections. This started days before his trip to Ghana to be the guest of honour at our presidential inaugural, and his presence here in spite of that grave danger is a testament to the growing stability of his country, and his personal bravery.
Ghana has reportedly contributed 200 troops and equipment to the effort by ECOWAS to install Adama Barrow as The Gambian President following his victory at the December Poll, now being contested by President Jammeh, who has been in power for 22 years, first as a military ruler, then as an elected leader. The constitutionality of the action of our President, in the absence of parliamentary involvement and fiat, may be trumped if success attends this latest strengthening of the capacity, credibility and integrity of regional and international bodies.
I am amused by the Ghanaian champions of President Jammeh, seeing that we have successfully exorcised military participation in our politics since the advent of the Fourth Republic in 1993. There is nothing particularly interesting about Jammeh to seriously observant Ghanaians who have been through the variations of militarism and dictatorship in our 60 years of independence. I must quickly add, however, that it was the incompetence of our civilian leaders which made our history possible, since we all know that political power abhors a vacuum.
Indeed, the size of The Gambia as a sliver of land jutting into the heart of the far bigger Senegal, suggests that it must be incorporated as part of Senegal for peace to reign in that area. But that is the future.
I am further amused by our feckless intellectuals who are happily advocating the assassination of Jammeh by those with the capacity presumably, completely oblivious of the consequences. I just hope by the time you read this today, some peaceful closure has been brought to this affair, or a roadmap agreed by all is in the offing.
Now to the vexing matter of equalisation in political violence after elections which change governments in our country. Is it not distressing to see and hear some of our otherwise reflective public figures give life and credit to this meaningless bestiality by recourse to the contemptible doctrine of equalisation? Who has avenged, or can avenge the crimes of the past in human history? Slavery? The Holocaust? Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia? The killings by Comrade Stalin? Or in our own country, the events which forced Prime Minister Nkrumah to quit Accra New Town and take up residence in the Flagstaff House way back in the 1950s? The reason is simple: all violent acts create new victims who in turn, at the opportune time, create new cycles of violence, spiralling into mayhem and destruction if prudent and wise leadership abandons its duty to preserve life and protect property.
This is our local version of collateral damage. We absolutely do not need it. It was during the Israeli effort to eject the PLO out of Beirut from June 1982 in which an Israeli officer complained in a media interview about the damage to his country’s image by the unintended killings of non-combatant Palestinian women and children. I very well remember the reaction of Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin. On national television, he rebuked the officer roundly, asking him pointedly. “who has ordered you to kill women and children?’’ as he removed his shoulder pips, cashiering him on the spot.
Was it my own younger brother Dr Kwesi Aning who asserted the other day in an interview on an Accra radio station that it would be good politics for the government and party of President Akufo-Addo to be the first to halt this unfortunate descent into mindless political violence as champions of the rule of law? As it is oft said, an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth system of justice, very rapidly will cause universal blindness and general incapacity to eat for all. Those acts for which successful prosecution can be pursued, we should leave to the professional judgement of our Attorney-General, and no one else.
This is because we must feel the change that Ghanaians voted for in how we confront and deal with such problems.