If Ghana was a democracy! the fate of Ofori-Atta

The ominous state of Ghana’s current economy is well known, but for the sake of those who may be reading this in 2030 and beyond, let me name a few indicators: Currency ranked the worst in the world in October 2022; debt to GDP ratio over a hundred percent; default on sovereign debt; and cup in hand at the IMF for a beggarly pittance of debt relief money.

For this immiserating, the index fingers of all Ghanaians are pointed at one man, the Finance Minister, Ken Ofori-Atta. Ghanaians across the political divide appear to be united in the call for him to be sacked. If Ghana was a democracy, Ken would be on a 10-year exile.

Although I single out Ken, my principal goal in this piece is to underscore the absence of the soul of democracy, which is accountability, in our present-day body politic, more broadly.

Ken

The Athenian democrats recognized that the virtue of office holder was not given by divine dispensation and so key decision makers were held accountable for their actions in Ghana this understanding is criminally lacking. In fact, accountability is the underlying premise of both the direct democracy of ancient Athens (508/7 and 338/7), and the representative/parliamentary/indirect democracies, jointly created by the English, Americans, and French in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, contemporary democracy.

In October 2022, a majority of the MPs of the ruling NPP held a press conference demanding that the President dismisses Ken as finance minister, for reasons related to the economic decline I mentioned above. The MPs argued that they were acting on the wishes of their constituents.

In that moment, I developed some faith that perhaps the logic of the representative system was finally becoming a reality; it was brief.

When the president did not heed the call of the MPs of his own party, on November 10, 2022, a motion for censure of Ken was introduced by the minority in parliament, hoping that if successful, it would lead to his impeachment as minister. Among the charges levelled against him was the (illegal) diversion of funds from the Consolidated Fund towards the notorious national cathedral project.

In addition, the minister was accused of having a personal stake in the
debt the country had piled up under his command, because an investment bank he co-founded played the middleman role for the government in most of the credit acquisitions.

The predatory partisanship only took a brief sojourn and returned when it was time to vote on the motion. The entire majority conference staged a walkout as if they hadn’t just a month earlier called for the minister’s head. But before that the majority leader tried to play both ends against the middle in a speech in which he projected his caucus as Pontius Pilate in the trial of Jesus
Christ of Nazareth.

At the end of the day, Ken won, but it was a pyrrhic victory. When he stood there in parliament and took that marathon dressing-down, I couldn’t help but ask, what’s in it for him?

In Athens, there was no partisanship as we know it today, and if the logic of the representative system of modern democracy was to hold, Ken would be exiled. Of course, I do not mean so literally, even thought that would have literally been the case in Athens.

The Athenian system had its excesses, the execution of Socrates its most notable regret, for which a posthumous pardon has been granted.

Generally, if a political leader became unpopular for leading the polity down a certain policy path which turned out to be a failure, a vote of ostracism was most likely to be brought up against them, and if found guilty, would be formally exiled from Athens for a period of ten years.

Accountability was key!

In our case, the soul of democracy has been stolen by the custodians of the state; the executive, judiciary, legislature, and bureaucracy (including the street level ones), with the lawyers and media enthusiastically cheerleading them on. The deceitful body (of democracy), though lifeless, is left behind, manifest in the form of elections every four years, to conceal the crime.

In the portmanteau word demokratia, it is the affairs or organs of the state that the demos (people) have Kratos (power or grasp) over; it is not just the mere egalitarian distribution of the nominal power to decide.

Democracy is sui generis

In Ghana, Democracy has been turned on its head; it is managed, top-down, and lacks the culturally generated spontaneous accountability triggers required for a polity to be truly democratic.

I have read some content and listened to commentaries of some professors of political science in the country over the years on democracy, and it doesn’t appear we can look up to them for inspiration. Most of them take the nearest textbook definition of democracy and run away with it.

No wonder the narrative that the democratic imagination and sensibility is alien to Africa has been internalized and mainstreamed.

The ontological lackluster of these abstractions has concealed the omnipresence of democratic practices in our indigenous body politic. The extended deliberative and consultative processes deployed in decision-making in our ethnic groups; and the intergenerational egalitarianism, especially around land ownership and use (custodianship) – galamsey would never have happened.

Universal suffrage would have been organic to a democratic Ghana. Some tribes such as the Frafras were largely acephalous, hence egalitarian. Even for some of those ethnic groups that the assumption to leadership was based on genealogy, women were inherent to the franchise as king makers.

The American revolution ended in 1776 and the constitution outdoored in 1787. In the intervening years, the founding fathers deliberated intensely on what they wanted their country to be like. This includes the dialogue of 85 Federalist Papers.

They admired the reformed British polity with its system of checks and balances and the separation of powers and wished to replicate it without the abhorrent authority of the King.

Our constitution is still colonial. And the lawyers are quick to invoke the fictional notion of the social contract to grant it universal approval. (And, oh, those atrocious wigs must go!). The colonial bureaucracy is still intact: no wonder policing in Ghana is like the policing of black bodies in America.

Our country has no founding; after independence, it proceeded in sort of a
blind Darwinian evolution. We must do democracy differently. We must build it ground up, from within, anchored by an evolving, reflexive, dynamic and culturally relevant innovative machinery of accountability.

In discovering it from within, we are taking democracy back to the where it belongs, the people, to fulfil its very purpose, accountability.

Basically, democracy, broadly speaking, is a template but in practice, a sui generis set-piece.