Editorial by Ghanaian Times: Democracy literacy critical for citizenry

Our story on page 11 concerns advice on how to combat electoral challenges emanating from disinformation.

Dr. Kevin Casas Zamora, Secretary-General, Internation­al Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance (IDEA), who gave the advice, urged the state to intensify collaboration between civil society organisa­tions and civic institutions to promote democracy literacy among the citizenry to help address such electoral challenges.

We cannot stop agreeing with his explanation that the collaboration would enable all groups to play their roles in mitigating the impact of disinformation on elections in the country.

We think as important as this piece of admonition is, it is also timely because some politicians in the country have long taken advantage of the low level of the citizenry’s knowledge of how democracy works to their undue advantage.

Our fear, though, concerns whether the government made up of politicians who want to perpetuate their stay in power will be forthcoming with the facts, especially when the facts would nail them in some way(s).

It is public discourse that Ghanaian politicians are generally dishonest and so sometimes certain issues concerning politicians emerge and dominate public discourse for some time and they are aban­doned for the people to forget about them or form their own opinions. Such opinions would have no effect because they are not based on the facts or truth needed to form them.

This reminds us of what one Daniel Patrick Moynihan stated on page 27 of the Newsweek magazine of August 25, 1986 “Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his facts.”

But the problem is more than Ghanaians probably can envisage, and so we want to call attention to what disinfor­mation is and what evil it can do to the whole country.

Sometimes, people confuse disinformation with misin­formation and use the two words interchangeably, which is wrong.

Simply put, misinforma­tion is false information that is spread usually without the intent to mislead because the speaker or writer has taken the information to be the truth, even if it may have been misheard or was not verified or ascertained.

This is common in everyday life where, for instance, we forget the actual thing and mention the wrong thing to a family member or friend, or we make typographical mistakes involving figures.

Disinformation, on the other hand, is false information intended to mislead to gain some advantage.

It is biased, very powerful, destructive, and divisive and is usually employed by politicians as a propaganda tool against their opponents or even espionage against other countries.

But we can conclude that Dr Zamora is concerned with the use of disinformation inter­nally to sustain propaganda that is inimical to the people’s application of free will to make their own electoral decisions or join actions that are presented as good for them but turn out to be to the advantage of just a group of people.

It is sad that even in the same political parties in the country, some members use disinformation against oppo­nents of candidates they support for positions in the parties.

It sometimes becomes petty and worrying when some spokespersons of candidates deny even what is public knowledge, all because they want to put their preferred can­didates in a good light and vilify the opponents to influence delegates to vote against them.

The public can listen to the messages about the ongoing New Patriotic Party (NPP) flag-bearer race and make their judgments.

In the face of this and other electoral challenges in the country, we believe democracy illiteracy among the people is critically important, especially about shedding emo­tions, gullibility, mob action, and spontaneous actions or acts that can be regretted later.

There is a need for cool heads to reign in electoral mat­ters in the country.