Today is the second day of a spanking new year, 2015, ushered into being two nights ago with religious services by churches, some of which have mastered the skill of giving wonderful names to the traditional watch night services.
But as is wont getting to the end of the preceding year, or at the beginning of the New Year, we fall into the predictable habit of assessing events of the passing year with a broader, calmer, more reflective brush than the breathless tone we adopt at the time such events are occurring.
It just happens that I have written copiously on all the major events of the past year, and have not hidden or decorated my views as to their meaning in our lives in the past year. Here, I would like to draw some broad strokes over the most glaring of these matters from my own perspective, even if in doing so, I repeat myself.
The first event to catch this retrospective is the heart-rending story of the stillborn baby of Madam Suweiba which got lost after its delivery at the maternity ward of Komfo Anokye Teaching Hospital (KATH) in Kumasi. Where is the baby of Suweiba?
The various reports and investigations made it clear that the usual protocols were not faithfully followed, thus lending credence to the widespread belief that the unfortunate baby may have been stolen and given or sold to another person, as has been the belief in this country for generations when such things happen. I am certain that the wide publicity given this case by the media and all of us would hopefully encourage hospital staff in similar situations elsewhere in the country to be more careful and follow procedure to the letter.
Case of DCE Barima
Then the weird case of District Chief Executive Gabriel Barima, who lost his cool while giving a public address, broke upon our flippant political consciousness. Mr Barima predictably lost his job, but managed to gain reinstatement to the feigned surprise of armchair critics of the political process, who disdain active participation while having nothing positive to say about the political process, which now and again reveals the very human nature of our politics.
I was very surprised to learn the DCE had been the first MP for the area in 1993, meaning he had firmly established himself in the area, and could thus count on the loyalty of his people who agitated for his re-appointment by the President. That is a lesson in resilience some of us have to learn.
Did anyone notice, as I did, the blunt revelation by one of the children of Ivor Wilks, the British historian who died this year, that Dr Danquah importuned Prime Minister Nkrumah in 1959 to deport Wilks from Ghana because he had disproved the linkage between the old Ghana Empire and the new independent country of Ghana?
Since there was no reason to disbelieve this, I am still wondering the wider implications of this revelation would one day come to haunt those of us in this country who believe in the intellectual and political liberalism of Danquah.
I think 2014 was one of the worst years since the return to constitutional rule in 1993 for the rank nosiness of certain clergymen into our political affairs, while ignoring the important business of tending to the religious needs of their church members. What is the biblical or religious basis for condemning our current system of government as inadequate and requiring drastic changes?
Who is a technocrat? The one party state and Union Government are both outlawed in this Constitution which has outlived all previous documents; precisely because it gave short shrift to such dangerous ideas, and here we have some of us preaching for their return. Why?
Unfortunate statement.
Last Wednesday’s Daily Graphic, on page 20, quoted Dr Ransford Gyampoh as asserting to my complete amazement that ‘’in advanced democracies, people look for competence, expertise, experience and achievement in life’’ before voting them into office.
This is an unfortunate statement because I assert that the two leading politicians in this country, President John Mahama and Nana Akufo-Addo, are both far more experienced in national politics than President Obama and Prime Minister Cameron of the United States and Britain respectively. Was Britain a transitional democracy when the 24-year-old William Pitt became Prime Minster two years out of university and served with distinction for 17 uninterrupted years over two centuries ago?
Some of the clergymen have permitted our very liberal attitude to religion in this country to compel them into saying utterly strange things, like the unsupported assertion by one of them that he can see the possibility of the then depreciating cedi trading at GH¢10 to one dollar by the end of last year! This cannot be the fruit of the Word of God in fallible man, but a calculated attempt to run down our currency for clearly political ends using the cloak of the clergy.
Our intellectuals and clergymen should spare us this new-fangled, untested and dangerous opposition to our multiparty democracy. They make the wicked mistake of falsely believing that we are in the grip of the undemocratic rule of the past, and seek the attention that earlier clergymen gained by standing up to be counted in the fight for democracy and civilian rule. Competence for political office in a democracy is decided solely by the people voting for whom they want to fill political office.
But perhaps the one thing which puzzled me the most happened at the very tail end of last year — the call by the 2016 NPP flag bearer, Nana Akufo-Addo, for a new voters register to replace the spanking new biometric register used for the 2012 elections. The idea of using a biometric register came from the NPP, and its faults, if any, were not canvassed in support of the electoral petition which they filed last year and lost.
Even if they had argued based on the register, when in this country have we sought to have the views of those defeated in court entrenched as statute law? As a political analyst, I can say that in practicable terms, a bloated roll is possible only in party strongholds. Fortunately, the Electoral Commission has denied the existence of a bloat in the current biometric register.
Happy new year to all my readers!
