If a high ranking official of a credible political party is lauded by his compatriots for excelling in loose talk, why should anyone be surprised when his deeds finally earn him a tongue roast by His Lordship Justice William Atuguba and a conviction for intentional criminal contempt? At a time when the country was mulling what it would take to mount an unprecedented challenge to the 2012 Presidential election, this leader’s most inspirational words were not the kind to preserve Ghana’s peace but the retrogressive “We will make Ghana ungovernable!”
Typically, instead of condemnation, we situated those treasonous remarks firmly in the ambit of the unyielding NDC-NPP fissure. Thus emboldened by blind partisan support, he had no option than to extend the insults to Ghana’s Supreme Court.
“People grow horns, they think they can ride over the state, run down everybody, mislead ordinary people, poison their minds” – Justice William Atuguba
To accomplish the above, politicians give themselves unfettered freedom to insult with malice and to speak with careless abandon, knowing we will never hold them accountable, with “political platform talk”, their only excuse.
So if it is not an NDC contemnor pledging not to accept the Supreme Court’s ruling, then it is an NPP contemnor pledging to cut of the heads of his opponents!
Typical of the sometimes incendiary internal politics of the Mills presidency, a young man in a different corner of the same party took, not to a contest of great ideas, but to one sided insults - your wife is repulsive, the opposition NPP dictates to you, you have an inferiority complex, you lack wise counsellors, your wife is a bully and a snobbish personality suffering from a certain complex, you are a hypocrite! He brought Mills to tears, reportedly.
As you can see, none of these insults was able to predict and/or solve the power crises that hit us earlier this year!
Alas! It took Mills’s death and the first anniversary of his passing for the painful lesson to be learnt that insults will take us nowhere.
“And I realise that indeed, I was unfair to you in many of my writings and utterances. On many occasions, I wrote things about you, and to you without really knowing for a fact if what I am saying is true or not. Other times, I based what I said to you in those letters and articles on hear say. I was consumed by an evil genius who just wanted to discredit you by all means. There were times I wrote about you purely out of malice. Upon reflection, it is obvious to me I had no basis in making many allegations against you or making aspersions on you. Now that you are gone, I know better, I cannot undo the damage of my misadventure. What I can do is to openly admit – and show remorse”. Even so, he learned and must be commended.
What kind of dirty politics is this whose focus is not the erudite discussion of legal opinion but an uncouth attack on the person of the presiding judge? What type of politics is this whose outcome is not the multiplication of opportunities, the provision of healthcare and the construction of schools that transform? What kind of politics is this that spurs on a highly educated politician to insult a sitting President as a person “whose mind doesn’t work” and who is a “kwasiampanyin” – an irresponsible elderly fool – who does not look after his own son even when evidence exists that the so called neglected son has the kind of relationship with the father that many will kill for, including the fact that it is this “kwasiampanyin” father who led the son to Christ during the period of neglect?
Now, since many of our political leaders opt to spend all their waking hours pondering how to outdo each other in choice insults, when are they going to solve the problems for which we vote them into office?
I couldn’t agree more with Mr Pratt when he concludes that some of the pretenders parading as political leaders and communicators are themselves so bankrupt of ideas that they happily engage in a politics of distraction in a rotten attempt to befuddle the issues, wield glorious power and leave our concrete circumstances virtually untouched while they themselves enrich themselves from our poverty.
They aim to distract you with insults into forgetting that you have not had a single drop of water flowing through your tap for the past ten years!
It is time for a deliberate push back from the good people that will elevate the standards of political discourse from personality attacks and insults into energising and inspirational ideas that solve our daily challenges of water, housing, power …
By Sodzi Sodzi-Tettey/Daily Graphic/Ghana
www.sodzisodzi.com
