Are we missing the fruits of democracy?

By Kofi Akordor
The politics of our democracy, it seems, is being driven by two powerful forces – the quest for power and the determination to remain in power. So powerful are these obsessions that all other things must fit into a grand design that goes to consolidate them.
In the process, we are unconsciously missing out on most of the good things that democracy offers countries that practise it. These include a very liberal environment that would engender free flow of ideas out of which will come consensus-building towards a common national development objective.
During election time, all the political parties and candidates use every available platform to market themselves and at the same time use every opportunity to discredit their opponents. This is tolerated in any multi-party environment since the more you can make your opponent appear weaker and less reliable, the better your chances of getting the support of the electorate.
Unfortunately, so consumed are we in our determination to win power that our campaigns become very acrimonious, unethical and antagonistic to the point of threatening national peace and stability. All said and done, one would have thought that the end of an election would signify the end of political campaign until another season, so that the party in power will address serious matters of state that will transform the country into a better place.
We are yet to come to that level in our political development. Right from day one, government officials do not know how to exit the campaign platform because their opponents, by some cunning way, have succeeded in keeping them there, thanks to a media that has found politics a profitable venture that should be exploited to the fullest advantage.
What that means is that the government’s focus is always distorted and its actions are virtually dictated by the opposition, whether internal or external, as the National Democratic Congress (NDC) government of Professor John Evans Atta Mills is experiencing now.
That is why the media, especially the electronic media, have become campaign platforms in which case on daily basis government officials must hop from one radio or television station to another, supported by party activists, justifying why they won the election and why the other party lost the election.
We are constantly being reminded of the past as if our whole national life is dependent on that and not the present and the future. A party in government rather than pursuing the agenda of national development becomes the party on the defensive, always trying to parry queries from the opposition or trying desperately to please its so-called grass roots supporters, who have become an army of hungry and frustrated foot-soldiers.
A big chunk of the population has turned every part of the city into a marketplace. City authorities want to act by enforcing the bye-laws. The traders let off the battle cry: “We shall not vote for you in 2012”. Party victory supersedes national development, so the government recoils to allow the illegality to continue. Opposition parties, especially those who are more likely to gain from any slip by the ruling party, know the truth and know that the city authorities are on the right track if there should be decency in the town we call our capital city but will join the chorus with the traders. “You see how callous the people you elected are?” they would ask with wicked smile on their faces. A national cause has been lost to political expediency.
A President comes under siege from within and without. He is reeling under a barrage of accusations – from leaving party loyalists to go hungry to failing to arrest and prosecute people perceived to have drained the national coffers for personal aggrandisement.
Out of desperation and without doing proper ground work, people are sent to court and later set free not necessarily because they are innocent but on technical grounds. Nothing can be more humiliating than to see a typical national wrecker laughing all the way to celebrate victory over haste and impropriety.
We know things that governments such as the ones that we have under the 1992 Constitution cannot do even if they wish to do so. We have gone beyond arbitrariness, so no matter how hard we may try, at the end of the day, the rule of law will prevail, no matter how people interpret it.
These realities are often lost to us when we are campaigning for political office. At the end of the day, we are held hostage by our own promises. The late Ya Na’s case is a national calamity that should be addressed so accordingly. But we have made it a political case to the extent that the effects have gone beyond the boundaries of Dagbon and are gradually pitting half of the country against the other, when that should not have been the case in the first place.
We must be bold and admit that our democracy is drifting. The party in government is spending a greater part of its time fending off accusations, while the major one in opposition is pushing the government on retreat. Both ways, the national cause is lost and it is all about how to remain in power or how to come back to power.
Meanwhile our national problems remain almost the same. Our educational system is still in a bad shape. To some of us the Capitation Grant and the School Feeding Programme that have become the song on the lips of government officials are not what we consider to be the solutions to a collapsing system. They are not answers for poor infrastructure, inadequate learning materials, lack of motivation for teachers and other workers in the education system and the poor examination results being recorded by our children.
We still have poor road network. It is strange and amazing that travelling between Accra and Kumasi, our two biggest and most important cities, cannot be an exhilarating experience, nearly 60 years after independence. Even a journey between Accra and Tema, a distance of about 30 kilometres, can be nightmarish.
With all the bureaucracy called the Ministry of Agriculture, we are not ashamed to receive maize donation from Japan, a country that is still trying to recover from the devastation of earthquake and the resultant tsunami and nuclear melt-down.
We still have serious challenges in several sectors, including health, water and sanitation, graduate unemployment and youth delinquency. These are serious challenges but which appear not to be of much concern to our politics. Ours is to win power, fair or foul, and do everything to remain there.
Very soon, four years will be over and the game will start all over. Government officials will tell us a million and one achievements they have chalked up while the rest of us struggle to see or come to terms with those achievements. The blame game will start as usual in the inordinate ambitious fight for supremacy in the political arena. But our country may not change for the better.

fokofi@yahoo.co.uk
kofiakordor.blogspot.com