By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.
Garden City, New York
August 24, 2015
E-mail: [email protected]
I don't know why the Presiding Bishop of the Methodist Church of Ghana, who also doubles as Chairman of the National Peace Council (NPC), thinks that the present robust debate on the Voters' Register, largely between the key figures of the ruling National Democratic Congress (NDC) and the main opposition New Patriotic Party (NPP), is dangerous for the peace and stability of the country (See "Voters' Register Debate Dangerous for Ghana - Rev. Asante" RainbowRadio.co.uk / Ghanaweb.com 8/24/15).
I don't suppose that the Methodist prelate wants us to return to the morally and intellectually stultifying silent-culture regime of Chairman Jerry John Rawlings. Besides, Ghanaians, by and large, belong to cultures of debate. That is also how healthy relationships and understanding are forged cross-culturally. Short of the preceding, Rev. Emmanuel Asante would be asking for war, for it is integral to any civilized democratic culture that the people are allowed to vent their anger and frustration, however virulently, as a means of finding a common ground vis-a-vis the best method for moving the country ahead.
Democracy is also about the vigorous exchange of ideas. In the end, even as Mr. Kofi Portuphy, the National Chairman of the National Democratic Congress, aptly and poignantly observed recently, at the end of this salutary ideational marketing, it is the Chairperson of the Electoral Commission (EC) and her staff who have the final say-so on whether the current Voters' Register ought to be scrapped and replaced with a new one altogether, or be thoroughly and credibly audited to meet the acceptance of all the major participants of this Great Debate. Acting in the alarmist and reactionary manner that Rev. Asante has been doing, for the most part, would not advance democratic culture and governance in the country.
Indeed, it was the abject absence of the kind of debate taking place in the country presently that prompted the late Prof. Albert A. Adu-Boahen to bitterly lament the morally and intellectually denuding culture of silence that gripped Ghanaians during most of the 1980s and early 90s. The Peace Council can make itself relevant by assuming center-stage and constructively husbanding the quality and direction of the ongoing debate, instead of pretending that the culture and/or tradition of thinking and bickering is alien to a bona fide human society like ours.
It is also rather unsavory and presumptuous for Rev. Asante to think that the Peace Council can patronize the administrators of the Electoral Commission by instructing them on how to constructively address the ongoing debate over the Voters' Register. Even as EC Chair Charlotte Osei has publicly and categorically stated, the EC is an independent civic institution that is determined to jealously protect its constitutional mandate and independence, as well as fiercely resist any dastardly attempts from any corner of our national political landscape to interfere with the conduct of its mandated activities.
Already, Mrs. Osei has requested from the leaders of all the legitimately registered political parties, about twenty-four of them, proposals for making the country's electoral system and process more transparent and credible. And so, really, it is rather superfluous for the Peace Council Chairman to presume to look over the shoulders of Mrs. Osei. Indeed, it is very heartening to hear Rev. Asante announce that the Peace Council is functionally all-weather and an all-year-round peace-broker, but it would be even more heartening to also hear Rev. Asante declare the Peace Council to be in favor of the robust and vigorous democratic trading of ideas around critical national issues, rather than resorting to the murderous agenda of the erstwhile Chairman Rawlings-led Provisional National Defense Council (PNDC), whereby Messrs. Rawlings and Tsikata whimsically and capriciously resorted to branding even well-meaning political opponents as "Enemies of the Revolution" and then summarily ordering their execution by firing squad or imprisonment without trial, in the most clement of circumstances.
The fact of the matter is that we simply cannot freeze our present democratic climate of free speech merely because a few lily-livered cassock and clerical-collar-wearing old men are afraid of blood. Life is ineluctably bloody from cradle to casket or the grave, for that matter. That does not, of course, mean we have to troll around looking or asking for trouble. It simply means the need for us not to be unnecessarily paralyzed by the fear of the purely human and even disastrous and/or catastrophic sometimes. I hope Rev. Asante also fully appreciates the meaning of his own surname and the sort of unmistakable personal and group identity it connotes.
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