Two events that caught the headlines last week were Founder’s Day and the screening of the Anas Aremeyaw Anas judicial bribery scandal video. What ideas link the two events?

Celebrated on Kwame Nkrumah’s birthday, September 21, Founder’s Day almost always draws some controversy over who should be named founder of modern Ghana. Until a BBC poll in 2000 named Kwame Nkrumah as the Man of the Millennium,insiders say the BBC bosses were praying that Nelson Mandela would come out on top and were disappointed when he came second. Nkrumah’s image was still suffering from the bashing of everything Nkrumah that followed the 1966 coup.

This year, a Founder’s Day Facebook posting by the president and CEO of IMANI Ghana policy think-tank, Franklin Cudjoe, drew angry comments from Nkrumaists. In his posting, Cudjoe, who described September 21 as a “needless holiday” criticised Nkrumah’s economic policies, claiming he “wanted to be king emperor and politicise life.”

A true democratic system?
This is the standard Danquah-Busia portrait of Nkrumah as the man who killed democracy in Ghana. But leaving aside the fact that the colonial state inherited by Nkrumah was not a democratic one, in the light of Anas’ Ghana in the Eyes of God revelations about our current judicial system, we might ask what essentially is the meaning of democracy when one of the planks of a supposed democratic system, the judiciary, is rotten.

This is not to say that all judges in Ghana are corrupt or even that most judges are corrupt. Nevertheless, the sordid manner in which judges sold justice in serious crime cases to Anas’ Tiger Eye outfit for relatively small amounts of cash and goodies raises many questions.

In my experience on the international NGO circuit, I have known a case where a labour dispute elsewhere in Africa was settled at a cost of several millions. Had Anas been in a position to offer millions, how many more judges would have succumbed and sold their consciences?

Your guess is as good as mine. Yet we cling to the notion that this model of justice in our democracy works best for Ghana and Africa. Indeed, Ghana is vaunted internationally as one of the best democracies in Africa.
In 1964, when Ghana became a one-party state, Nkrumah’s opposition branded him a dictator.

So successful was this branding that when he was toppled in the 1966 coup with the help of external forces, people rushed onto the streets to celebrate the overthrow of a dictator.
But today economic historians tend to call Nkrumah’s model of statecraft the ‘developmental state’.

Getting the job done
One of the characteristics of the developmental state is its autonomy. This means that the state may not always do things according to international norms and conventions. But it does get the business of development done well.

Franklin Cudjoe writes on his Facebook wall that he “never liked Nkrumah's economic thinking”. As an example he states that Nkrumah “emphasised industrialisation when we were an agrarian economy.” Cudjoe does not miss the opportunity to knock what he calls Nkrumah’s “odd ghost of central planning”.

Yet Nkrumah’s model of industrial development was the standard 1960s development model.

An example of a developmental state leader who was a contemporary of Nkrumah is South Korea’s General Park. He used unconventional methods to drive South Korea to its current status as a ‘tiger’ or ‘miracle’ economy.

For example, Park subsidised Korean industrialists but also gave them production targets. If they failed to meet their targets they were thrown in jail. This did not meet international standards of human rights and democracy, but it did get the job done.

In Ghana, by contrast, Nkrumah was overthrown and Ghana became poorer and poorer.

Running the country another way
So what is democracy without economic development? Beyond the freedom to decry our condition and insult our leaders, what is the deeper meaning of our four-year traipsing to the ballot box to elect yet another crop of leaders, at least some of whom are bent on lining their pockets, knowing that they can count on certain judges to guarantee they are never brought to justice?

If judges and their support institutions are selling justice for goats, sex and small amounts of cash, then what is happening elsewhere in our democracy? For example, how much does it cost to have a ballot paper spoilt or miscounted? What is the minimum bribe to bloat a voters register, let’s say to truck people in from outside the country to vote? Or to register ghost names or children as voters?

If the judiciary, which is supposed to make our democracy work cannot be trusted to enforce the rules, then we might be forgiven for asking why have Westminster-style democracy in the first place? Why not detach the judges from all that pomp and ceremony and bring them back to the level of the people they are supposed to serve?

Why not develop a local model of democracy based on inclusive indigenous principles through which justice can be served and seen by all to be served? Who says we can’t run the country another way?