Is the Ghanaian Woman Prepared to Become President?

By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.

As the 2012 presidential election draws dangerously close and the heat gets turned on Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo, flagbearer of the main opposition New Patriotic Party (NPP), to name his running-mate, part of the talk has also focused on whether, indeed, Ghana is ready to have a woman presidential running-mate, let alone a substantive female vice-president (See “Ghana Is Not Ready For Female Running Mate – Ursula” Ghanaweb.com 12/10/11).

The preceding, of course, is the wrong question to ask. What we ought to actually be discussing is the extent to which the Ghanaian woman envisages a career in national and international politics as a major preoccupation, in much the same way that her fellow male citizen envisages the same. And if not, then what may be some of the salient factors either discouraging or impeding the ambition of the Ghanaian woman in her bid to assuming the reins of national governance?

This is not the first time that the question is being raised. And we must also hasten to add that early this year, a Ghanaian woman with, perhaps, inordinate presidential ambition hotly contested a sitting president at the presidential primary level and suffered a blistering loss. But, of course, the bizarre case of Nana Konadu Agyeman-Rawlings was more of an exception and an anomaly than the norm. for starters, she is the wife of a former Ghanaian strongman morphed into a democratically elected civilian president and has been the country’s first lady for just under twenty years, the longest in Ghana’s 54-year-old postcolonial history.

Then also, Mrs. Agyeman-Rawlings shares the at once blotchy and bloody political track-record of her husband’s, a record that is literally littered with judicial assassinations and systematically orchestrated disappearances of political opponents and others arbitrarily classified as “enemies of the revolutionary state of Ghana.” And so, really, it hardly came as any wonder that members and supporters of her own political party, the ruling National Democratic Congress (NDC), roundly rejected the presidential candidacy of the former first lady.

Secondly, it must also be significantly noted that her gross inability to assume and assert her own political voice during the course of much of her presidential primary campaign, hugely contributed to her predictable debacle. In other words, Mrs. Agyeman-Rawlings campaigned almost as if she was running a domestic and conjugal errand for her husband, just exactly as she had done in the wake of the now-President John Evans Atta-Mills’ selection of Mr. John Dramani Mahama as his running-mate in the lead-up to Election 2008.

And then also, the former first lady did not appear to have any comprehensive and constructively strategic agenda for the development of the country, besides her immitigably vindictive agenda, again inextricably shared with her husband, of summarily and indiscriminately rounding up and severely prosecuting almost every one of the cabinet members of the Kufuor-led erstwhile New Patriotic Party government, whom the proverbial bloody couple continue to envisage as their mortal enemies, rather than their most formidable ideological opponents.

And it is squarely for the foregoing reasons that one cannot unreservedly agree with Ms. Ursula Owusu, the New Patriotic Party’s candidate for Ablekuma-South in the 2012 general election that, somehow, a Nana Konadu Agyeman-Rawlings presidential candidacy would have been exactly what the proverbial doctor ordered vis-à-vis the national political advancement of the Ghanaian woman. Indeed, had she succeeded in her rather morbidly mischievous bid to forging a Rawlings dynasty, Ghanaians would likely have been anxiously bracing for another perennially apocalyptic bout of the kind precipitated on their pates by the former Ghana Air Force flight-lieutenant. And the latter irruption of what may aptly be termed as “conjugal” or “bedroom” politics would have done a piddling little to advance the cause of the Ghanaian woman. For, needless to say, in the megalomaniacal playbook of the Rawlingses, politics is a purely familial affair, the strategic façade of her so-called 31st December Women’s Movement notwithstanding.

It is also rather curious that the erudite Mr. J. H. Mensah should be suggesting the possibility of Nana Akufo-Addo’s fielding a female running-mate, knowing full-well that among the highly religiously charged conservative Ghanaian majority populace, fielding a female running-mate at this youthful historical juncture is almost certain to effectively torpedo the presidential ambition of the NPP flagbearer. Ironically, it is on the preceding score that one cannot help but unreservedly concur with Ms. Owusu that presently, the focus ought to be squarely trained on the massive empowerment of the Ghanaian woman at the grassroots and parliamentary levels, as a logical boost towards kick-starting the long-term active participation of Ghanaian women in the rough-and-tumble realm of presidential politics.

Indeed, selecting a woman running-mate could well give his most ardent detractors what may aptly be termed as “nuclear ammo” with which to further impugn the already delicate image and controversial reputation of the NPP flagbearer as a skirt-chasing gallivanter.

*Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D., is Associate Professor of English, Journalism and Creative Writing at Nassau Community College of the State University of New York, Garden City. He is Director of The Sintim-Aboagye Center for Politics and Culture and author of “Sounds of Sirens: Essays in African Politics and Culture” (iUniverse.com, 2004). E-mail: okoampaahoofe@optimum.net.

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