EDITORIAL: The President and his successor

Calendar year 2008 will be the most crucial yet for our tender and young democracy. It will be the election year when Ghanaian voters decide whether to, for only the second time in h istory, democratically hand the reigns of power over to a new Government.

In 2000, the voters' Xs made a clear statement that the performance of the NDC did not merit a repeat performance, that, after at least eight in power, it was time to give another party, the NPP, a try at running the country. In a one person one vote democratic system, this is the ultimate crossroads. It is remarkable to reflect on the number of long-term democracies in which voters consistently choose to stay the course.

Japan, Canada, Sweden, the United Kingdom, Germany, Singapore, and Malaysia are examples of nations that have had relatively successful one-party rule for much of their democratic histories despite having other options available to them. What the citizens of these nations did was to resist the urge to experiment, analysed their own values and core goals for society in concert with the performance of the ruling government, and decided that their current government was the best choice available.

In 2008, Ghanaians need to do the same. To make a change is of course our democratic right, but to change only for the sake of change would be a grave error in judgment and a clear testimony to fallacious logic, one that could leave us with a regressive government that would undermine the progress we have achieved in recent years. What Ghanaians do not want is to go back to the Ghana of despotic rulers, runaway inflation, and massive and chronic unemployment as well as poverty, leaving us ever-dependent on conditionality-labelled World Bank and IMF loans.

As voters we must rationally analyse the performance of the two main political parties, each of which will have ruled for half of the previous 16 years, and decide which of them has performed better. That party is the one that has earned the opportunity to lead Ghana into 2012.

Incorporated into this analysis of the two main parties will need to be a serious consideration of the two party leaders.

The NDC has given us an example of rational democracy in choosing Prof Mills as its flagbearer. The message from the NDC only reinforces The Statesman view that you do not exercise your democratic right to change merely for the sake of change.

His past failures aside, members of that party decided that he was the best candidate available to take them into the future.

The NPP will choose its flagbearer later on in the year and a lot rides on this decision, which will be made by a couple of thousand party members, for our country. As the nation looks on, party insiders will do their best to rationally choose the best possible candidate.

President Kufuor, who by then will have had eight years on deck as President of Ghana, deserves some say over who will safeguard and carry forward his legacy, and the strong record of the NPP as Government.

It is true that the President already took considerable flack for his support of Stephen Ntim in the Party Chairmanship contest in December 2005 but in that particular instance, Mr Kufuor had no experience as Chairman on which to base his opinion.

Of course it would be undemocratic to simply let the President hand-pick his successor, as the former President Jerry Rawlings did. But to dismiss the opinion of the most experienced leader in the NPP, who has the best working knowledge of the strengths and weaknesses of various candidates, would be to miss out on a very legitimate source of accumulated knowledge.

Kufuor has shown the good grace, judgement, and wisdom to avoid coming straight out and expressing his choice of a preferred successor. Instead he has only left it to the astute observer to determine his wish-list by a process of elimination based on the criteria he has set for the ideal flagbearer. NPP delegates would be wise to consider, analyse, and debate the words of its most experienced and arguably most successful democratic leader.

Ghanaians, in turn, would be wise to consider, analyse, debate, and then choose the party and leader that have demonstrated the most success in moving our nation forward in accordance with our values and goals.