No dogma or purity among the political parties
By Kofi Akosah-Sarpong
Campaigns for
elections in the impending December 2012 general elections are deeply heating
up. Issues, policies and programmes are increasingly dominating the campaigns.
As Ghana`s democracy develops, the years of politics of insults, tribalism, and
acrimony are gradually giving way to politics of issues. Sometimes the
political parties fall over each other over issues. Civility is in the air.
Real democratic maturity is flowering. The issues games are so exciting that
political parties have been accusing each other of stealing ideas from the
other.
From remote
villages such as Nagodie, a small cocoa farming community in the Brong Ahafo,
to big towns such as Damongo, in the Northern region, everyone is talking about
development issues and pinning the political parties to their development
promises without fears. Part of the reason for the high issues-based campaigns
is the quality of politicians emerging. Almost all the presidential candidates
have higher university education and globally exposed. They have deep sense of
where Ghana
is coming from in its development strides.
Of the eight
political parties legally registered none has any distinct ideological dogma or
purity. As the late President Hilla Limann would say, “Ghana” is the
political parties’ “ideology.” Even the newly formed Progressive People's Party
(PPP) is no more difference ideologically from the old parties except that it
appears to articulate issues better. The good old Convention People`s Party
(CPP), founded on Marxist-Leninist socialism, isn`t different from the other
parties in its ideological issues in tackling Ghana`s development challenges.
The CPP`s core stimulating message of agricultural growth is no more or less
different from that of the PPP, NDC or NPP.
The NPP appears to
have bigger, detailed ideas and is dictating the issues games, sometimes
driving the NDC in particular crazy. Education, the leading campaign issue, has
seen enriched debate about not only how to make it free, from nursery to the
senior level, but also how to make it quality. Still, the NPP has entangled the
NDC and other parties in the issues competitions, tactically confusing them
from talking about pressing development issues such as sanitation, health,
women, children, agriculture, industrialization and rural development. In
particular, the ruling NDC has been countering the NPP, sometimes to the
detriment of projecting its own development agenda.
It doesn`t matter
if the NPP call itself libertarian capitalist or the NDC say they are social
democrats, a mutation from their earlier hard-lined socialist credentials,
their statements and manifestoes are
virtually the same, blurring in most issues, sometimes the differences just
symbolic. The Institute
of Economic Affairs has
given presidential candidates the platform to explain their policies and
programmes and answer questions from Ghanaians. This has further opened the
issues games and deepened Ghana`s democracy. Twirling in the background are
emerging think tanks and non-governmental organizations such as the Danquah
Institute and IMANI that have been taking on the political parties on their
issues, dissecting them and pointing out their weaknesses.
From their
manifestoes and pronouncements, the parties say the same thing. It doesn`t
matter if Ghana is practically a two-party system, with the main opposition New
Patriotic Party (NPP) and the ruling National Democratic Congress (NDC) being
the foremost political parties that could easily win elections.
Philosophically,
the NPP projects more private sector ideals than the other parties. The PPP is
good on this, too. The NDC, largely seen as anti-private sector, has not been
able to extricate itself from its military shadows where it brutally attacked
the private sector for Ghana’s
economic woos. It is, therefore, not surprising that the campaigns are more
centred on government attempting to provide all goods and services, of which it
cannot. This makes the issues games unbalanced, putting enormous burden on the
struggling public sector. That the private sector has not been heavily touted
in the campaigns is a big problem for Ghana`s developing democracy and
progress. The education sector that has received high debate will be better off
with the involvement of more private sector investment.
Driven by mass
communications gadgets and increasingly enlightened mass media forums, for now,
Ghanaians have clear choices of issues in voting for political parties unlike
years of invectives that dominated campaigns and blurred the political field.
Additionally, how the opportunity of issues will be implemented to solve
Ghana`s development problems will be determined by the character and actions of
the politicians involved.
Kofi Akosah-Sarpong sent in from Ottawa, Canada
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