A season of promises

THE game is getting more and more exciting as all the parties and their candidates criss-cross the length and breadth of the country, drawing attention to themselves with their promises. The season is ripe for such promises that are being dished out with gusto from all the parties and their candidates to those who are willing to hear and believe. There are many others who will listen but reject or treat with contempt some of the outrageous promises, based on past experiences. Promises, sometimes compiled into manifestoes, are like the grease that lubricates the campaign machinery of the parties and their candidates. At least, they are necessary to test the candidates’ appreciation of our national problems and how they are going to solve them. It is a phenomenon associated with the democratic culture and Ghanaian politicians are not alone when it comes to campaign promises. What is lacking, which has created a big gap between the promises and the reality once parties win power, is our inability to take parties/candidates on for their campaign promises. Elsewhere, politicians are careful about what they say on campaign platforms lest they lose their credibility and integrity. Here, politicians just drop the promises like ripe mangoes in windstorm without regard to the sensibility of the electorate, knowing very well they are as soon forgotten as they were delivered. There could be many reasons why our politicians often escape with their empty promises. I could readily cite a media that is not aggressive enough to hold politicians accountable for their promises. The media which credit itself as the fourth estate of the realm very often abandon their traditional roles and become appendages of politicians in government or in opposition. Our journalists become so much attached that they lose the moral courage and strength to speak authoritatively and objectively on issues of national interest. Second, there is so much fanaticism in our politics that we fail to see the good in others and the evil in ourselves. Party supporters take entrenched positions and defending their parties even if it is clear that the national interest is suffering. Even when it comes to fighting corruption, party fanatics are not able to differentiate between individual misbehaviour and party interest, and so as long as government functionaries can count on party support, they can easily escape sanction for undermining the national interest. In other words, governments are able to escape with failed promises because majority of Ghanaians are not prepared to assess our leaders by the quality of their performance or the calibre of people who constitute the leadership of parties. The promises being made today towards Election 2012 are not different from the ones we have heard since we returned to constitutional rule in 1993. We have had enough of promises to turn this country into a paradise. If promises were anything to go by, there should have been two additional international airports in Kumasi and Tamale. Again on transportation, there should have been a railway line connecting Accra, the national capital, to Tamale in the Northern Region and beyond, while expressways with asphalt cut across the length and breadth of the country, linking all our major towns and cities. Based on previous promises, fishing communities on the coastal belt should be brimming with fishing activity at modern landing sites with refrigeration facilities. Still on agriculture, the Afram and Accra plains should by now become food baskets of the nation, with irrigation canals feeding farms with water from the River Volta, which flows wastefully into the sea. While we continue to pronounce the private sector as the engine of growth, the sector has not benefitted from the needed government support to truly deliver as the engine of growth. The sector continues to battle the same problems – lack of capital and unfair competition from cheap imports from outside, especially China and other Asian countries. All our governments at various times made promises that were never delivered, either because they were made without any commitment or they were made without calculating the costs and other social implications. We cannot continue to survive on empty promises. Our political parties and presidential candidates must begin to take the business of campaigns serious and tell us what they can do and do well and not what we want to hear from them. The electorate must also be discerning and begin to assess candidates on merit and not by party affiliation. We should be able to disengage ourselves from our candidates if it is obvious that their interest does not coincide with the general good of Ghanaians. It is only when politicians realise that they cannot take the support of their traditional strongholds for granted that they will buck up and deliver when given the mandate. fokofi@yahoo.co.uk kofiakordor.blogspot.com