Like Sisyphus, Nduom seems to have a frustrating task ahead of him. Indeed, his is a difficult undertaking, Herculean in its proportions. He has to lift what is arguably, the most popular political party in the history of Ghana, from the detritus of ideological and populist oblivion and plant them back into mainstream Ghanaian politics. Were that all, we could well say that, with a clear head, any committed ideologue such as he, given today's dire socio-economic milieu, could surmount this challenge.
But he is saddled with much more girth. He is constantly encumbered by the ideology of the CPP - Nkrumaism - a nebulous dogma, part socialist, part religious, part customary philosophy, a confusing amalgam of spent half-truths that denies causal agency to individual African states in the development equation - except they unite with The Man himself as President for life - and therefore ultimately postulates neo-colonization and its evils as an inevitable force of domination.
Again if the question of tradition were the only consideration then Nduom need not fear. After all he is only dealing with a fanatical and rather flippant electorate, whose votes are directly proportional to the volume of their bellies, as filled by the politicians, on a given electoral day. Competing with his own head-load are, on the one hand, the incumbent tradition, the so-called Busia-Danquah-(Dumbo) tradition whose claim to fame arrived, thanklessly, through a curiously named contraption called the Committee for Higher Cocoa Prices, an event in our rather inglorious history when defeated hosts of academic and professional bourgeoisie linked up with the chiefs whom they had rejected as agents of the colonialists, and in the process ignited a socio-political mayhem that still infects the body politic today. Is it any wonder that when the tradition's standing president has a feud with his Minister of National Security, they call in a tribal potentate for mediation, and when all the mediation is done, the fired security chief vanishes into South Africa for cataracts treatment? Would it not be interesting to see George Bush call in the Chief of the Mohawk Indians for consultation if he sought to fire Condoleeza Rice for incompetence? And what if Rice is fired? Would she disappear into South America for the treatment of kookoo?
On the other hand, Nduom need not be petrified by the other popular tradition, the NDC, which owes its existence to an overzealous military officer who in a frantic and desperate attempt to purge corruption among his superiors found himself literally in the national seat of power; and having tasted its aphrodisiac essences for three months, violently returned after a short respite from power and misruled for nineteen years. Seems like Ndoum's competitors, to say the least, are rather unflattering and even unsavory!
Seeing the present correlation of forces in his and the CPP's favor, Nduom has fired a salvo that is replete with such masterly sophistry as only him the tactician can. In a statement attributed to him on Ghanaweb - and neither he nor the CPP have come out to deny it - Nduom revamps the vapid statist ideology of the CPP. Employing a lucid metaphor, one that I have used recently on the same site, Nduom states that under his government, the state will 'give the private sector the engine, the oil, the body and a first class road to travel on'. He has killed two birds with one stone; Firstly he has one-upped the incumbent Busia-Danquah - Dumbo Higher Cocoa Prices people who preach that the private sector is the engine of growth but whom he accuses of leaving the 'sector alone to fend for itself'. Secondly , he has given 'chop-money' to the CPP by daring them to accept present development reality, that, in the so-called late-comer industrial countries, wealth creation and the ability to generate capital for industrial, technological and commercial development, have largely been achieved by the determined state's commitment to entrepreneurship and widespread private ownership and participation. Already, Mr. Nduom's new position has resulted in a first casualty. Kwesi Pratt, one of the noisiest of the ideological empty barrels has been removed as publicity spokesperson for the CPP and an engineer put in his place. Seems like progress? Maybe not!
No sane man would challenge the peremptoriness of the state's role in modern development practice, just as no one would challenge the private sector's role, but the ingredients that make these possible - the generation of indigenous capital - is totally left out by Mr. Nduom. Herein lies his sophistry and the speciousness of his argument. In each of the examples of state-sponsored development, Japan, Korea, Singapore and Malaysia, the state was highly instrumental in generating indigenous capital through some form of agrarian reform. It is wishful thinking to assume the state laying down pristine conditions for the private sector's performance when it cannot generate its own capital, and is waiting for foreigners to invest, or is waiting for some windfall from oil in a few years.
As I have stated elsewhere on this forum, the stumbling block to indigenous capital formation in Ghana is the encumbering of land rights by ethnic corporate ownership headed by an ascending principle of family heads, clan heads, chiefs and paramount chiefs, tendana and skins. As long as land, the basic resource, is thus encumbered, our attempts at indigenous capital formation will come to very little fruition, even if we start reaping the much ballyhooed oil bonanza. Nigeria is an example of this assertion.
And no sooner was Mr. Nduom elected as the CPP presidential candidate than he started frolicking with the Togbis and Nananom, soliciting their support for his presidency. History, it seems, repeats itself just as we saw in the case of the party's founder who had once swore that chiefs would 'run away and leave their sandals behind', only to be crowned a little while later with the ultimate chieftaincy title of Osagyefo after he had made all the other chiefs subordinate to him. Is Nduom capable of dispossessing these largely retrogressive institutions and removing their encumbering influences on the land? Me thinks not! And what if in our wildest imagination, Nduom actually dared to dispossess our Nananom, Togbis and Skins of their stranglehold on land? We would have the academics screaming about these Nananom being an integral part of our culture and how it is good to preserve our culture, and how dispossessing them of their custodianship will bring chaos into the country, etc etc.
And then once again, people like me would state the obvious - that more awesome entities like the monarchy and nobility in Europe, the church in Europe, the samurai and daimyos in Japan and the landlords in Korea have all been dispossessed of land for the general good. And here we panic before a moribund, weak, avaricious and former slave-trading institution, all in the name of some misguided culture. No wonder we tend to be the laughing stock of the world.
So then, after all the promises and platitudes, we will arrive back at square one where business proceeds as usual and politicians relapse into the normalcy of private wealth creation - theirs - and wallow in their own ineptitude after elections are done. The Sisyphean cycle would come back to the beginning point again waiting for another election year to start all over again.
I fervently hope Nduom will realize that!
Kwesi Yeboah
Halifax, Nova Scotia.
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