Today, I wish to look into a growing but disquieting phenomenon that threatens our system of governance. It is becoming the habit of some of us, a growing yet very loud minority for now, to seek political advantage through the resort to the courts of law in the Republic, or advance political positions so laced with barren legalisms as to leach the democracy we are enjoying of its vibrancy, its animation and robustness.
This dangerous minority seem to be telling us that unless we adopt their positions, or see things the way they see the same things, we are foredoomed to live in contrived non-existent strife and civil war, in addition to constraining our national progress and development.
Court democrats, as the name suggests, are the practitioners of the unending interest and passion in seeking a resolution of essentially political questions in the courts of the land. They are those whom, in our present dispensation, the Christ would have counselled, to recognise that the laws are made for our convenience and communal happiness, and are mainly a means to enable our mutual interactions to take place peacefully, not a fixed bronze statue to be worshipped.
Court democrats see judges as essentially superhuman beings whose judicial pronouncements must supervene in all and every circumstance of our political lives. At bottom, such people are backdoor believers in the tyranny of Union Government, in which partisanship must be outlawed and political sameness is a virtue.
The seeming legitimacy of the baleful efforts of these champions of anti-politics is stimulated by the high academic, social and political credentials of its proponents. I have chosen to identify the practitioners of this type of harmful national politics as Court Democrats, though it would be acceptable to use the famous phrase of Supreme Court justice, His Lordship William Atugubah, during the hearing of the presidential election petition, to describe them as practitioners of Illegal Political Galamsey.
Before I discuss in general terms my take today on the import of the activities of court democrats, we have in hand their cousins comfortably ensconced in some think tanks in this republic who thrive and gain media attention by constantly preaching the coming doom of this country if we do not pay heed to matters Ghanaians have been familiar with, and have practised with some success, since 1951, when we first had a party political government which gained office through popular suffrage.
Let us look briefly at the IEA-sponsored campaign to alter the basic competitive nature of our multi-party democratic system to suit a view which I find completely at variance with our constitutional and political order.
The campaign has not once told Ghanaians which country is experiencing and enjoying continuous peace, development and tolerance because the winner of electoral contests, is sharing power with others who did not win, that is, whose view of governance lost out in the contest of ideas. They have not, because no such country exists. But the IEA IS not calling for the abolition of party politics either, abandoning their own logic without explanation.
They are not also preaching coalition government because we all know the basis for such short-term political arrangements in any country. Why should whoever is elected President appoint anyone he does not want to work with? Is Westminster parliamentary rule not good for the British people because all ministers are also members of parliament?
If the CHRAJ and EC heads are voted on by a party-denominated Parliament, why is it necessary to seek two-thirds agreement when the most powerful and important individual in the polity, the President, is elected with the votes of fifty per cent plus one of valid votes cast nationwide? Was Justice Emile Short constrained in his admirable and praiseworthy work as CHRAJ commissioner because the partisan President Rawlings appointed him?
If the prospective heads of public corporations and their boards should be based on a shortlist from the State Enterprises Commission and Public Services Commission, who appoints members of the SOE and PSC? Civil Society Organisations, a self-appointed inchoate group with no constitutional basis, of which the IEA and IDEG are charter members, should be included in the membership of the Council of State?
They have completely forgotten that advice qua advice is not binding on any chief executive in the world, because it is advice! The President is not even bound by the decisions and opinions of his own cabinet! That is the way other countries ran their affairs, and we are no different.
I suspect that the highly academically-qualified folk who are doing this would have preferred their kind to be holding political office without the drudgery of working for it as party members because it is below their dignity, but that has never guaranteed the absence of disagreement or active partisanship anywhere in the world.
The person with the best CV to be elected President of the United States, George Walker Bush, in 1988, lasted only one term! The entire IEA/IDEG campaign is anti-political in the extreme, and should be abandoned by its proponents.
Now back to the general theme of court democracy, of which the above is a variant. Court democrat describes the current penchant for some of us, staunch members of established political parties, to seek resolution of essentially political questions in the law courts.
I am here not referring to the election petition last year, where a political party unsuccessfully sought victory at the polls through a court pronouncement. In that instance, it is instructive to note that the first legal challenge to an election victory happened in Cape Coast in 1953, when Kofi Amponsah-Dadzie, the losing candidate of the Ghana Congress Party, successor to the United Gold Coast Convention, in a bye-election occasioned by the sudden death of the CPP MP, Kwesi Plange, succeeded in wrestling the seat from the winner, the CPP stalwart, Nathaniel Welbeck, in a dramatic court case which introduced Ghanaians to electoral disputes.
My concern today, however, has to do with internal arrangements, conventions and practices inside parties which these days are more likely to end in court, as seemingly-aggrieved party members, seek the intervention of outsiders to a family dispute for victory.
The courts cannot be where we practise democracy, or validate decisions of the people, because judges are not qualified to run parties, or make political decisions for us. That is our sole right and privilege as the citizenry, included in which are the very judges we have elevated to be arbiters in internal disputes!
The practice may very well be a sign of the destruction of belief in the good faith and tolerance of party executives, which in turn, spawns vindictiveness which spills over into national politics. The result is the intolerant hardline positions taken by party executives that manifest in unpalatable speech against opponents who are seen as enemies who must not just be removed from positions of influence, but exterminated, especially if they are seen as representatives of certain objectionable views.
