By Kofi Akordor
Midway through President Barack Obama’s 2010 State of the Union address to Congress, a voice rang out, “It’s not true.”
The maker of that embarrassing statement was later identified as Samuel Anthony Alito, a former Supreme Court judge.
That irresponsible behaviour was widely condemned. The leadership of Congress rendered a public apology to President Obama. The man himself called Obama and apologised for that split moment of indiscretion.
The message here is loud and clear: The sanctity of the American Presidency cannot be violated, no matter the freedoms spelt out for individuals in the constitution. That is the politics of a nation that believes in playing the game according to the rules.
On Tuesday, February 15, 2011, President John Evans Atta Mills breached protocol when he delivered his State of the Nation Address to Parliament by not acknowledging the presence of the Chief Justice, the leadership of the House and former President John Agyekum Kufuor.
The President publicly acknowledged his mistake, which he said had been oversight, and went on to apologise to the personalities concerned.
On the same day, the Minority Leader in Parliament chose to register his protest on the same matter by publicly snubbing the President by refusing to escort him out of the chamber of the House, as is customarily the case.
As has been said very often, two wrongs do not make a right. Many might not have realised that the President breached protocol in his salutation during the State of the Nation Address, but millions watched while the Minority Leader chose the path of positive defiance to register his protest at the President’s mistake. What was otherwise a good case had been poorly bungled by that act of indiscretion.
All those who felt slighted by the President’s mistake, including the Minority Leader, are justified in expressing so, at least for the records, but should it have been at the expense of the sanctity of the presidency? Should our democracy be reduced to a child’s play because one party has faltered or made a mistake? Should the Minority Leader’s action be a signal to people of this country to defy authority or treat our leadership with scorn and contempt at the least mistake or provocation?
A week after that unfortunate incident, many Ghanaians heaved a heavy sigh of relief when information got round that President Mills had invited former President Kufuor for a meeting at the Castle. Truly, the meeting came on and former President Kufuor admitted that even though the invitation had been at short notice, he was obliged to honour it because of his respect for the presidency. Secondly, as a former President and an elder statesman, he must be prepared to respond to national calls at all times.
Nothing can be more soothing to the hearts of Ghanaians than those beautiful words. The two leaders never told the public what went into their discussions, except that they dwelt on national and international issues which are of interest to Ghana.
One would have thought that the meeting between the two leaders would serve as a solid foundation for us to mend our ways and reach out to one another. Sadly, commentators from both the National Democratic Congress (NDC) and New Patriotic Party (NPP) chose to dwell on the negative side of that great event.
While the NDC hatchet men saw the invitation as a lesson to former President Kufuor on how to reach out to former office holders, NPP activists saw the invitation as a public relations gimmick, as if public relations itself is a bad thing in communication science.
Such is the nature of our politics that everything has been reduced to the level of personal confrontation among people who do not see anything good in one another. At every turn it seems we are only looking out for negative things about other people. We are missing the good things democracy offers to people.
The freedoms our Constitution guarantees the individual, to many, mean freedom to insult, vilify and attack verbally or physically our perceived political opponents. At first we thought political confrontations were restricted to election years and during political rallies. But here we are; our whole national life has been characterised by political violence in one form or another, acrimonious debates empty of rationalisation, sober and meaningful contributions.
While we are at one another’s throats, we have failed to notice that just after one heavy rainfall, Accra, our national capital, has become one huge mud city because of poor drainage and irresponsible behaviour on our part as residents. We do not even realise that most of our traffic lights do not work at peak hours. We are rather interested in trivialities such as what dress somebody was wearing.
In other words, we have failed to use our democracy, which we are told on a daily basis is the envy of other countries, to confront development challenges. Instead, we think it is an opportune time to settle old scores that years of dictatorship had suppressed.
The media, especially the radio, have not helped our quest for national unity and the crusade to move this country away from its present miserable state into a better place for us all. Far from setting a development agenda, the media have set a confrontational agenda by feeding the people with nothing but hatred and insults in divisive language.
The leadership of the various political parties, especially the NDC and the NPP, and those in government have not helped matters in any way by their outbursts and other forms of irresponsible conduct. It appears people are more interested in winning political power, without necessarily being interested in solving our problems.
I saw a full-page advert placed by Mr Kofi Amoah, a business executive, raising issues with the negative trend which is diluting our politics. That means many discerning Ghanaians are not happy with the way some people are doing politics in this country.
The challenges confronting this country are just too many that we cannot afford the luxury of spending the whole day insulting one another, threatening death and mayhem and fanning ethnocentric sentiments.
Media practitioners and owners of radio stations should remember that they stand accused for creating the platform, in the name of media freedom and freedom of expression, for hostility to flourish in the country. I still do not know the benefits of some of the phone-in programmes and discussion programmes on television apart from bringing out the animalistic instincts in us.
We may not realise it now, but we may be gradually sowing seeds of social disintegration by the politics of hate, acrimony and mischief which is now the order of the day.
It is better we emphasise the things that unite us than those which divide us.
fokofi@yahoo.co.uk
kofiakordor.blogspot.com
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