Partisanship and Tribalism will only hinder our development

Nana Owusu-Nkwantabisa

It’s been a while since I wrote an article for this forum. The healthy debate
that used to transpire on the platform is clouded with partisan and ethnic screaming.

Just check the number of comments posted to topics that call for healthy discussion
like what I am addressing in this article to inflammatory posts and conclude for
yourself.

Back in 2013, I wrote the article ‘Corruption, Politics, and Tribalism killing
Ghana as a rejoinder to a comment made Nana Akenten Appiah-Menkah
(http://209.197.117.98/GhanaHomePage/features/RE-Corruption-Politics-and-Tri
balism-killing-Ghana-267752). Those 3 evils remain the major impediments to our
national development. In this article however, I want to address the latter two again
since corruption is so obvious. I also believe that the latter two among other things
fuels the first. We need to resolve these issues to unleash the continent’s
development.

Partisanship?: I am a huge fan of democracy. I will confess that my
sympathies have lied more with the NPP tradition primarily because of its
commitment to promote a culture of liberal democracy in Ghana. I am an admirer
of both Kwame Nkrumah and Jerry Rawlings but refuse to support their political
traditions ONLY because of the autocratic cultures that they perpetrated. When you
hear me talk about Kwame’s vision and sense of urgency or contrast Jerry’s
leadership to some of his successors, you would question if my sympathies truly lay
with NPP. Well, my sympathies lie with Ghana and I detest partisanship and
tribalism.
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While Nkrumah’s one-party state or Acheampong’s UNIGOV were seen as
tools for dictatorship, there is a lot to be said against multi-party democracy in
Africa and I am convinced that Africa must seek to define for itself what constitutes
liberal democracy. Multi-party politics as I have argued in other articles and as have
been echoed by people like Professor Lumumba of Kenya, in several respects, is
alien to the African culture. I have argued for parliamentary democracy akin to our
village councils or chief’s courts that are representative of every clan. Imagine that
all the best people from your constituency contest as independent candidates and
the constituency sends it’s best candidate (not the one imposed by the party favored
in the constituency) to parliament? Wouldn’t all parliaments be filled with the best
from each constituency? I have made the football analogy before - wouldn’t our
national team be the best from each region? Our parliament should be the
equivalent of our beloved Black Stars.

What about regional or district caucuses? All parliamentarians from a district
should be able
to unite and fight for a district instead of being divided by parties.

The party concept as my friend Lumumba and others will say is an import - part of
the Washington consensus concepts that we believe we must ‘ape’ to join the comity
of developed nations. We don’t have to. The world can also benefit from our
culture and an African export. Parties are divisive and Europe and America would
be grateful if Africa provided a solution for the whole world.
Our communities are divided, we waste millions on ensuring electoral purity
and our nations are on the brink of war because of this foreign construct. Where is
the will to stop this and do something right for Africa for once?

Tribalism?: I suppose you can see that if we eliminate partisanship, tribalism
although not eradicated, will be diminished. The NPP Akan tag and the NDC
non-Akan tag will evaporate. As Ghanaians, in all honesty, these ethnic divisions
only exist as a result of politics. We date, marry, fellowship, and work with each
other until a politician looking for power comes to tell us that those people are
against us. Our brains start making us believe that nonsense and then all our senses
are heightened to that and we start interpreting every individual’s efforts through
tribal lenses. We even take it into sports.

Let me share why I think that both of our founding fathers- J.B. Danquah and
Kwame Nkrumah were right in different respects and failed us by not seeking ways
to bridge their differences. JB believed that we should form and consolidate gains in
Ghana and celebrated our traditional societies - Okyeman, Asanteman, Anlo, Asogli,
Dagbon, Gonja etc. He was proud of our cultures. Kwame saw the need to go
beyond ethnic boundaries and unite the entire continent. There is no reason why
both virtues could not be pursued. There was no need to suppress and abolish the
traditional systems to achieve the continental dream. In Kwame’s mind, the
traditional system was an obstacle to the sweeping changes he was bringing to the
continent. As a transformational leader (and he was), he was moving with speed. I
would have advised him to bring all the chiefs along instead of ‘chasing them so they
leave their sandals behind”.
We are all proud of our ethnicities and would never accept subjugation. As a
continent, we have so many ethnicities but we have a common fate and so it is
important to embrace our common identity as Africans and fight for a common
cause. That was Kwame’s position and it is understandable but persuasion would
have worked better than coercion and imposition. Amidst the chaos that has
unfolded due to our inability to resolve our basic political questions, has corruption
festered.
Let’s rise as a nation and a continent united to address the fundamental
challenges of poverty, unemployment, underdeveloped infrastructure, basic health
care etc. and flee from the divisive tendencies that made us the worse victims of
slavery centuries ago and continues to keep us impoverished and destitute today.
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