By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.
Among the heinous crimes that ought to provoke the summary overthrow of any democratically elected Ghanaian government is not the so-called Economic Partnership Agreements (EPAs) with the European Union countries (See "Overthrow Mahama Gov't If It Signs EPA - Dr. Percy" Radioxyzonline.com / Ghanaweb.com 3/25/14).
If any civil societal organizational leaders firmly believe that this set of inter-governmental compacts are regressive to the economic development of the African continent as a whole, then the logical response is for our leaders to formulate and put on the negotiation table a set of counter-principles jealously protective of the integrity of the far less technologically advanced partner.
For clearly, Dr. David Percy of the National Reform Party (NRP) is apt in pointing out the fact that any economic partnership forged between African countries and the European Union countries, predicated on free trade between the two geopolitical entities, is bound to be a lopsided partnership of commercial unequals. This is what the late Nigerian writer and thinker Professor Chinua Achebe characterized as the new "Horse-Rider" relationship between the erstwhile European colonial imperialists and their former subjects. Such a partnership is also bound to seriously and thoroughly undermine Africa's fledgling industrial progress.
And the most progressive answer to such lopsided compact, is for Africans to unreservedly and promptly demand good governance from our leaders. Unfortunately, so far, we do not seem to be doing nearly enough in this direction. For instance, vis-a-vis the particular case of Ghana, there is nothing inexcusably exploitative that the EPAs are likely to wreak on continental African economies that our self-inflicted corrupt regime of judgment-debt judicial conspiracy has not already done and continues to do.
What is more, under the present circumstances, I don't see any government on the continent poised to putting the collective interests of its people over and above those of individual politicians and their cronies. This, of course, is not meant to justify the potentially deleterious effects of the EPAs. It is simply to acknowledge an inescapable truth.
In other words, Africans have ourselves to blame. Our woeful inability and deliberate lack of will to proudly and comfortably take charge of our own affairs are the pretext out of which the EPAs were formulated. And the sort of crassly unenlightened lawlessness being desperately advocated by Dr. Percy is the surest way of inducing precisely the abject condition which the NRP leader claims to be fighting against.
In other words, creating pandemonium in Ghana and, by logical extension, the rest of the African continent, is the most facile method of inviting foreign military intervention and an unsavory return to the status-quo-ante or classical colonial imperialism. And I think Dr. Percy is rather unwisely allowing his deep-seated anger and frustration to cloud his rational faculties.
Indeed, in ushering themselves into their Fourth-Republican political dispensation, Ghanaians had elected democratic governance over military dictatorship. And we are not about to give up the enlightened principle of representative government, if also because we have fought fiercely and extremely hard for the same, but primarily because it is the surest and most creative approach to socioeconomic, cultural and political advancement.
Dr. Percy and those possessed of his trend of thinking have a far better chance in pressuring our democratically elected representatives into serving the collective interests of the people, than childishly presuming to intimidate the same out of these seemingly woefully misguided, and even downright nihilistic, leaders.
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*Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.
Department of English
Nassau Community College of SUNY
Garden City, New York
March 25, 2014
E-mail: okoampaahoofe@optimum.net
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