Commentary: Badu-Akosah, CPP, and Traditional Institutions

Both as a medical doctor, a bureaucrat, a policy-maker, a globalist, and as an international health expert, Prof. Agyemang Badu-Akosah is known as a serious high achiever without any theatrics in Ghanaian developmental circles. For long time he had been helping develop the British medical system. Then for his traditional royal calling (he is a prince from one of the Asante ruling families) and Ghana’s needs Prof. Badu-Akosah jetted to Ghana to participate in nation building, tackling Ghana’s medical challenges, penning insightful articles about Ghana’s struggling healthcare delivery system and heading Ghana’s professional medical association for some time.

In Ghana, Prof. Badu-Akosah came to experience the rough-and-tumble of the Ghanaian health sector, coming face-to-face with how majority of Ghanaians struggle daily to improve their health, and more seriously, how poor Ghanaians access traditional medicine against the shortages of the Western orthodox medicine. Overtime, this has taught him not only the schism between traditional and modern orthodox medicine and also traditional and modern Ghana developmentally, but the challenge of reconciling the two. It is in this context that Prof. Badu-Akosah argues that there is the need for “government community based funds” that should “be channeled to local joint assemblies/traditional councils” and that “Traditional councils would be reformed to bring them into the 21st century” and that “Nananom (Traditional rulers) are our partners in development…Their wise advice cannot be ignored.”

Now, Prof. Badu-Akosah, one of the key presidential aspirants of the minority Convention People’s Party (CPP), which had initially ruled Ghana for almost 9 years under first President Kwame Nkrumah, talk of appropriating Ghana’s traditional institutions in its progress, once again, confirms the growing thinking that Ghana will develop better if its policy-makers, bureaucrats and consultants could openly appropriate its traditional values in its development process. The central thinking, as Prof. Badu-Akosah and other emerging thinkers in this context argue, is not “returning to some” archaic, unrealistic, and unproductive “pristine traditional cultural milieu to underpin the political arrangements of the modern nation-state,” as a critic erroneously claims, but rather the mature opening of Ghanaian culture, and simultaneously appropriating its good parts and refining its inhibiting aspects for policy-making, bureaucratizing and consultancies.

The thinking, of which Prof. Badu-Akosah need to play with, is that you do not give up your values for “Other” values to develop, as has been the case with Ghana and Africa for the past 50 years – no society develops from such practice, as the British-Indian writer Salman Rashdi would say. The current developmental picture is that either Ghanaian/African elites do not know what they doing or are confused or do not understand their environment in the context of developing policies, bureaucratizing or consulting when thinking of their societies’ progress. This has been the case in Africa since colonial rule and this has negatively affected Africa’s development process over the years effectively closing huge traditional values for progress. The inference, as some international development experts will tell Prof. Badu-Akosah, is that not only is Ghana/Africa not having good policy-makers, bureaucrats or consultants but they don’t have confidence in their own innate traditional values that have been sustaining Africa for centuries. If anything at all, Africa’s history, norms, values and traditions should drive its progress or Africa’s policy-making, bureaucratizing and consultancies should be able to play with Africa’s history and traditional values by either juggling them or mixing them with Africa’s colonial legacies and the global progress values for the continent’s progress. Fruitful advancement of Africa’s progress will come from such best practices in the long run.

These inadequacies are seen in Ghanaian-born Dr. Y.K. Amoako, former head of the UN Economic Commission of Africa, observation that Africa is the only region in the world where its development process is dominated by foreign development paradigms to the detriment of its own traditional values. One African country that comes out of Dr. Amoako’s observation is Botswana where its development paradigms are proportionally informed by its core traditional values and that of its ex-colonial and the global ones, as Scott A. Beaulier (of Mercer University, USA) and J. Robert Subrick (George Mason University, USA) variously explain. Practically and globally, this is nothing new – Southeast Asia’s prosperity has come about by their policy-makers, bureaucrats and consultants’ ability to mix their traditional values with that of the global development process.

Prof. Badu-Akosah’s new thinking and conviction comes in the context of the nostalgia of yesteryears giving way to uncompromisingly active intellectual inquiry into Ghana’s development process – even from non-Ghanaians (Readers can read the publisher of the Washington D.C-based www.ghanadot.com, E. Ablorh-Odjidja’s insightful piece, “What Sekou may have missed about Nkrumah’s good work,” which reveals that unknown to most Ghanaians, the on-going development process is more or less a follow-up of Kwame Nkrumah’s Convention Peoples Party (CPP) no matter the party in power despite the fact the main opposition National Democratic Party (NDC) did less in this regard though it was in power for 19 years).

For historical and material reasons, Prof. Badu-Akosah should have solid reasons to help midwife a new generation of policy-makers, bureaucrats and consultants whose work will be driven by Ghanaian traditional values as way of correcting the mistakes of yesteryears, more so during the rule of his CPP under Kwame Nkrumah. For despite Ghana’s first President Nkrumah’s grand developmental visions – Akosombo Dam, Tema Harbour, University of Science and Technology, Kumasi, among others – under the CPP that Prof. Badu-Akosah wants to lead, one mistake Nkrumah did was to harshly marginalize traditional institutions, as the fertilizer for Ghana’s progress, in the greater development of Ghana. Partisan politics aside, Prof. Badu-Akosah has to help enhance what President Kufour has set in motion in this regard, courting those who think in this direction, consulting traditional institutions, and making global outreach to help deepen it where necessary