By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.
Constitutional "plagiarism" is very common the world over, particularly among leaders of Third-World countries. And the simple reason is because the postcolonial systems of governance were established by the erstwhile Western colonial powers. During the 1950s, Dr. J. B. Danquah raised the imperative need for the emergent Western-educated then-Gold Coast Legislative Assembly leaders to draft a constitution whose tenets were organically predicated, for the most part, on the major indigenous Ghanaian cultures and our customary practices. A cultural anthropologist of genius, the Doyen of Gold Coast and Ghanaian Politics envisaged such legal and political organicity as the best course for accelerating the modernization of our traditional cultures, as well as rapidly developing the country as a whole.
It was the then-Prime Minister Kwame Nkrumah who dismissively suggested to Dr. Danquah and his backers in the Legislative Assembly that drafting such a crucial and seminal governance instrument was an unnecessary waste of time. Instead, Nkrumah sneeringly riposted that when it came time to drafting an independence or postcolonial constitution for an emergent Ghana, all that members of the Legislative Assembly needed to do would be to pick up any standard political science textbook and make the desired modifications to suit the purposes of the newly emerging nation.
I am therefore not the least bit surprised to hear Dr. Richard Amoako-Baah accuse members of the Constituent Assembly that drafted the country's Fourth-Republican Constitution of having lifted this most significant and sacred instrument of governance verbatim from the Kenyans (See "Ghana's Constitution Stolen from Kenya - Dr. Amoako-Baah" Metrofmonline.com / Ghanaweb.com 5/29/14). If, indeed, Ghana's Fourth-Republican Constitution was lifted from the Kenyans hook, line and sinker, then, of course, I wholeheartedly concur with the Chairman of the Political Science Department at the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST) that it is far past time that our 1992 Constitution got thoroughly revised to synch it with the specific needs and aspirations of the Ghanaian people.
It is also inexcusably pathetic for a country that boasts of being the lodestar of Africa to be saddled with legal and constitutional experts with such a scandalous bankruptcy of the imagination. But I would be more interested to have Prof. Amoako-Baah conduct a comparative analysis of the first three constitutions of postcolonial Ghana with the present one and offer us his opinion. And while I would also like to see extortionate military strongmen like the former Chairman Rawlings give a serious account of their stewardship, nevertheless, I am wistfully afraid that the time for such reckoning has long since past. President John Agyekum-Kufuor had the prime and golden opportunity to move the nation forward in this regard but grossly misfired with his namby-pamby copycating of South Africa's Truth and Reconcilliation Commission (TRC), which provided Ghanaians with hardly any worthwhile truths and even far less reconcilliation between the key operatives of the two major political parties in the country, namely, the ruling National Democratic Congress (NDC) and the main opposition New Patriotic Party (NPP).
What is clear from the preceding observations is the fact that the greatest problem of Ghanaians leaders today may well be abject intellectual lassitude, psychological alienation, cognitive dissonance and low self-esteem. No amount of economic forums/fora is likely to move our country forward anytime soon. We first need to embark on a thorough psychical and psychological re-programming before we can begin to talk about the socioeconomic, cultural and political development. Mr. Kobena Eyi Acquah, during the 1980s, summed up this Stygian mess of national affairs in his slim but quite impressive volume of poetry titled Where We Are Going Is Long.
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*Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.
Department of English
Nassau Community College of SUNY
Garden City, New York
Board Member, The Nassau Review
May 29, 2014
E-mail: [email protected]
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