What is happening at the House of Commons in Britain should open the eyes of our Parliamentarians and Ministers about the political thievery that goes on in Ghana. Britain was our colonial master. Our politicians may have learnt the art of political thievery by inheriting the modern system of governance from Britain. Even if this were the case, [though I do not buy that], it is in no way a justification for our politicians to emulate what is bad. And if they believe that they must emulate everything their colonial masters do, then that fact should also force them emulate what is going on in Britain.
“Se wohu se obi abodwese rehye a, na wasa nsu asi wode ho,” a Ghanaian proverb says in Twi. Translated literally into English, it means “you learn from the misfortunes of others”.
Our politicians have looted Ghana for years. It is some of these lootings that gave some military opportunists excuses to stage some of the past coups in the country...coups that also gave the men in uniform bigger chances to loot Ghana even more, using guns and decrees to help them to gag critics. The 1992 constitution was supposed to usher into Ghana a new era... a new era that would make Ghanaians and their leaders move away from the past into a new period during which the political lootings and abuses would never happen again, [we thought]. We drafted and put in place what we believed [in 1992] to be the ‘right’ constitution to push the nation forward and away from its crooked past. How more wrong could we have been?
Soon after the NDC government was changed in January 2001, report after report appeared regularly in the news media showing how Rawlings’ NDC looted the country for eight years from January 1993 to December 2000. Then eight years later, after the NPP was also changed in January 2009, we have been reading almost every day that the eight years administration of Kufuor’s NPP has also looted the country. Without evidence to the contrary, one can only assume that the facts we read from the papers are the true accounts of the two parties, [as presented by the two parties judging each other in their capacities as people Ghanaians must believe in]. And certainly, we believe what they both tell us....that “both the NDC and NPP are thieves”. Between the two, that is what they are both saying. I am, therefore, justified in stating these facts from them.
Apart from these volumes of evidence of looting and other forms of corruption provided by the two parties themselves, there are also other abuses of political offices supposedly done “within the law or within rules.” One of these ‘legalised’ abuses include the granting of accommodation in Government houses to MPs and Ministers, [including those who contest and win elections in Accra and those others who come from other places in Ghana but who own houses in Accra]. Another ‘legalised abuse’ is the allocation to Parliamentarians and Ministers of state vehicles that they keep and use as if these vehicles were their own private properties.....using them for private functions including funerals. To add insult to injury, when these political office holders come to the end of their administration, they drive away and keep these government vehicles in their houses, as if they have been given to them as farewell gifts. They keep these vehicles for months until pressure is put on them to return them before some of them send theirs in. Others, under what they call “following established convention”, opt to buy these nearly new vehicles at severely slashed-down prices. Then there is what these honourables call “ESB” for Parliamentarians, Ministers, Veeps, etc, that they say the 1992 constitution allows them to claim [lawfully]. ESB in every four years that they have to seek re-election? How?
These are only a fraction of the benefits these honourable men and women say the constitution of 1992 as well as ‘their unwritten’ conventions allow them to claim. And they claim them just as Shylock demanded his “pound of flesh”, no matter what available compassionate circumstances militate against such enforcement of claims.
Meanwhile millions of Ghanaians struggle to make ends meet, including feeding themselves. Meanwhile several schools are held under mango trees in some rural parts of the country. Meanwhile many roads are crying for repairs while millions weep every week as a result of fatalities from motor traffic accidents resulting partly from bad road conditions. Meanwhile the nation continues to borrow from abroad to swell up the national debt, as well as to compromise our independence. Meanwhile the nation’s economy staggers with inflation climbing [at a time when, in most economies elsewhere, the worry is about deflation....and not inflation. Meanwhile our politicians continue to suffer from incurable ‘political glaucoma’ that is constantly diminishing their ability to see the dangerous road ahead of them. Meanwhile these same handicapped politicians waste their time and the little energies they have fighting each other over their ‘lootings’, rather than putting their heads together to find common grounds and solve national problems. Meanwhile the bells are jingling and the echoes are sounding loudly in the chambers of the House of Commons at SW1 in London.
Will the honourable politicians in government and in opposition in Ghana consider doing what their British counterparts are currently doing to clean their acts and restore public confidence in them? They should learn from their colonial masters and mistresses before they find themselves swept away by a tsunami of public anger that the several years of abuse of their offices are gradually generating within this one-time beautiful country of ours that has now been robbed to destitution by her own sons and daughters within a relatively short period of 52 years of independence.
By Otchere Darko (An independent-minded Ghanaian unaffiliated to any political p
