By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.
The article itself was largely sound in thematic thrust and to the point. Captioned “This Is The Mother Of All Stupidity” (Ghanaweb.com 7/6/12), it deftly and thoughtfully explained why the Afari-Gyan-led Electoral Commission (EC) was being rather foolhardy in its attempt to drive the country’s economy down the drain by threatening to create 45 more constituencies, and thus 45 more parliamentary seats, barely four months before Election 2012.
Actually, the author of this fairly long article was far less concerned about the temporal span of Election 2012, than the dire economic implications entailed in the creation of 45 more avenues for reckless politicians to further scam and cream the people. And the latter, coming at a time that even established global economic giants like Britain were seriously considering a remarkable reduction in the number of parliamentarians seated in the august House of Commons, smacked of nothing short of fraud.
What fascinated me about the article, though, was the writer’s all-too-logical good guess that, invariably, population growth does not spread evenly across any country. And also, implicitly, that some regions of the country very likely had experienced far more population expansion than both the Electoral Commission and the Ghana Statistical Service (GSS) were making the general public believe. In essence, what the foregoing means is that there may well be quite a number of constituencies that may have lost a remarkable percentage of the constitutionally stipulated 50,000 people. If the foregoing has validity, and there is absolutely no reason not to concur with the same, then what is promptly required here is constituency re-demarcation, rather than arbitrarily attempting to appease some sections of the general population by vacuously pretending as if population growth and spread have, somehow, been even across the country during the course of the past decade. Well, by way of a personal contribution, I would quickly add that perhaps Parliament may need to raise the average population size of a constituency from 50,000 to 75,000, and may even think of doubling the former figure in the foreseeable future, in order for the country to be able to maintain a more efficient and less burdensome, unwieldy and corrupt governance apparatus.
The preceding, of course, is about the extent of my agreement with the author of the article captioned “This Is The Mother Of All Stupidity,” a rather dull and jaded caption for such a fairly spirited and discursively productive argument. Productive, that is, until the writer capriciously and almost fatuously attempted to rope in one of my political and ideological heroes, and one of Africa’s great thinkers, scholars and social scientists of the twentieth century for gratuitous abuse. Now, I don’t know why the detractors of Prime Minister Kofi Abrefa Busia, largely former Ghanaian deportees from Nigeria, during the 1980s, and fanatical Nkrumaists, or both, believe that the Aliens’ Compliance Order was either exclusively about the massive deportation of Nigerian immigrants from Ghana, or even about the massive and summary deportation of non-Ghanaian West African immigrants, when, really and simply, it was a government edict primarily demanding that foreign nationals resident in Ghana regularize their permanent residency or stay in the country, in order for the Sovereign State of Ghana to be able to track their presence and existence in the country.
Indeed, it is a verifiable fact that Nigerians who took the Progress Party government’s edict seriously enough to document their status in Ghana, got logically exempted from being deported from the country after the elapsing of the deadline for compliance. Then also, certain categories of aliens, such as Nigerians of Ibo ethnic descent, who had allegedly bore much of the apocalyptic brunt of the just-ended Biafra War (1967-1970), and who could forensically prove the same, were promptly exempted from deportation.
In other words, what I am boldly and honestly contending here is that the Aliens’ Compliance Order which, by the way, was drafted and legislated by President Nkrumah and his Convention People’s Party (CPP) regime, and had actually been selectively used by the African Show Boy to summarily deport Ghanaian-born Nigerians, such as the Alhaji Amadu Bamba cause célèbre, was applied by the Busia administration with measured consideration. Indeed, I personally have several Ibo-descended relatives who were exempted from deportation during its “indiscriminate” or wholesale application by the Progress Party government. But what is even more significant to bear in mind is the context of the high spate of antisocial acts of criminality, largely engineered by resident foreign nationals, in which the Aliens’ Compliance Order was reparably invoked by Prime Minister Busia.
And so it is rather unpardonably embarrassing that quite a remarkable percentage of otherwise reasonably “schooled” – as opposed to “educated” – Ghanaians continue to believe that the greatest tragedy to befall Ghanaian politics was the Busia-enforced Aliens’ Compliance Order. I suppose those who seem to have so facilely bought into the Akan maxim of “foreigners being the builders of towns” and civilizations, also believe that such glorious indigenous Ghanaian states and empires as Asante, Dagomba, Akyem, Fante, Conja, Dagarti and Adanse, among a host of others, were all essentially built by foreigners and handed over, gratis, to their indigenes by these Santa Clauses from Nigeria and elsewhere.
The fact of the matter is that, in as much as non-native contributions to any remarkable culture and/or civilization cannot be underestimated or taken for granted, still, no pestilence, or social plague, is more damnable than a willfully antisocial resident foreigner. On the latter score, even my own late father, an ardent CPP operative and a rabidly anti-Danquah-Busia-Dombo Ghanaian citizen, resoundingly applauded Busia’s enforcement of the Aliens’ Compliance Order as one of the shining moments of the Progress Party. “You ought to have lived in Accra, or in any of our regional capitals, as a mature adult, at the time, to fully appreciate the great significance of the Aliens’ Compliance Order,” my father once said to me.
*Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D., is Associate Professor of English, Journalism and Creative Writing at Nassau Community College of the State University of New York, Garden City. He is Director of The Sintim-Aboagye Center for Politics and Culture and author of “Ghanaian Politics Today” (Lulu.com, 2008). E-mail: [email protected].
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