Do politicians come to power to serve or the other way round?

Politicians, both incumbent and opposition, have sought to create the impression of winning power or maintaining same only to come and serve them. Is this view reflective of the reality or is one of the nonagenerian cliches?

More often than not, masters exercise some degree of coercive powers or force their servants to serve them but this seems to sharply contrast the usage of service to the citizenry in respect of politicians especially the Ghanaian one.

There are several pertinent issues which create humongous loophole in the assertion that the Ghanaian politician wants to serve but not the other way round. Issues bordering on their gratuity, corruption and many more are quintessential examples in this regard but one that can not be over looked is holding of elections in a pandemic that puts the health and by extension, the life of the masses of our people at risk in the name of serving them.

I strongly hold the view, and I believe others too, that the provision of service to a master must not endanger him. Therefore in the midst of this pandemic, one would have thought our political actors both incumbent and opposition would come together to fashion a way out to mitigate the impact of this pandemic on the life of our people.

Some of the measures could be postponement or outright abandonment of the 2020 elections. Interestingly, people who claim to have our votes to serve us would have engaged in rancorous battles legal or otherwise to create national security problems for us all. Therefore to avoid this gloomy situation, the only thing we have to do to have peace is to conduct elections at all cost even at cost of our lives.

The point must be made vociferously that our political actors have lost the opportunity to prove to the masses of our people that what they have been saying in respect of coming to serve is true and nothing more. For instance, from the history of the Forth Republic, an elected political party has had, at most, two terms.

Analysing this critically, the opposition could have elected to boycott this election and reap the colateral benefits from this decision in the 2024 general elections. Also, the incumbent has put all the government machinery such as appointment of ministers, chief executive officers of state institutions in place already. This, in no way, excludes the incumbent from my view that all of them could have played a role to stop this election from being held in this perilous time in a manner that would have ensured peace continued to prevail beyond December 7, this year.

On the back of the above analysis, the conclusion is that coming to power to serve you statements from politicians, incumbent and opposition alike, is 'yaamutu'