The Dilemma of a Concession

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

On the face of it, Nana Akufo-Addo’s assertion that he conceded electoral defeat to the now-President John Evans Atta-Mills in order “to avoid a bloody clash between supporters of the New Patriotic Party and the National Democratic Congress, as happened in Kenya and Zimbabwe” (Modernghana.com 1/19/09), seems quite laudable and even noble. However, upon closer examination, such assertion reeks of the disturbingly problematic. This is primarily because in the best of worlds, any concession of defeat in a democratically credible election must be based on principled good faith and nothing else.

What the preceding means is that if in his heart of hearts, as it were, the presidential candidate of the New Patriotic Party (NPP) for Election 2008 actually believed that his run-off opponent had not won the election fair and square, as it were, then in conceding defeat, Nana Akufo-Addo flagrantly shortchanged not only his staunch supporters and sympathizers, both at home and abroad, but the former Justice and Foreign minister also ensured, either wittingly or unwittingly, that democratic praxis in Ghana would remain, at best, a travesty and, at the worst, a sham.

Why? Because the very notion that in conceding defeat to a political party with an established track-record of state-sponsored terrorism peace would then prevail defies logic. On the contrary, conceding defeat to such a party almost certainly guarantees that the party conceding is unwisely exposing itself as well as its members and supporters to the very situation, or problem, that it claims to be avoiding.

In sum, if Nana Akufo-Addo was accurately quoted as having asserted the foregoing to the Tamale-based North-Star Radio, then, indeed, the New Patriotic Party may be setting a very bad precedent in the history of democratic Ghanaian politics. For, now that it has been made publicly clear to the members and supporters of the fire-and-brimstone-spouting National Democratic Congress, all that the latter needs to do in order to hang onto power in perpetuity is to threaten civic mayhem, as quite a number of the leading members of the NDC did during the last election. And if that becomes an acceptable political norm, then Ghana may well be on its way to reestablishing itself as a one-party dictatorship, as became the reality with the meteoric rise to power of Ghana’s first premier, Mr. Kwame Nkrumah.

Another troubling aspect of his assertion is the fact that Nana Akufo-Addo and, indeed, the entire top-hierarchy of the New Patriotic Party appear to believe that the scions of the Danquah-Busia camp can actually voluntarily lie down in the middle of the democracy highway, as a means of passive protest and, without a real fight, let the steam-rolling and single-minded NDC juggernaut run over them and still succeed in “pushing the nation’s development agenda forward.” And if, indeed, there were any such thing as a consensual acceptance of a common national development agenda, then why doesn’t the NPP simply strike set, or fold up, and merge with the brass-knuckled NDC in order to realize precisely such purportedly salutary agenda?

In other words, our contention here is that while, indeed, there may not be only a single ideological approach – or method – towards our national development agenda, the rather lame presupposition that conceding defeat, largely on grounds of maintaining the peace, rather than a good-faith acceptance of having been trounced at the polls, however narrowly, seriously and fundamentally endangers Ghana’s painstaking search for a genuine democratic culture. Then again, what if a Kenyan or Zimbabwean type of a political apocalypse were to occur in Ghana? Then what? Are we being misled into believing that Ghanaians would then not be considered civilized enough for the assumption of a democratic culture? To be certain, the kind of temperamental docility, falsely parading as civility, that has widely come to be associated with our Ghanaian national identity could never have created a President Barack Hussein Obama of the United States. And while like most Ghanaians, I would rather have had President Obama’s father to have been born a Ghanaian, it, nonetheless, makes perfect sense to me that the first American president of direct continental African heritage would be produced by the Republic of Kenya.

You see, their bloody Mau-Mau struggle for national liberation, during most of the 1950s, has healthily steeled the Kenyans, as well as the Zimbabweans (with their Patriotic-Front wars of attrition against the racist Ian Smith regime), Angolans, Namibians, South Africans and Mozambicans, into a salutary acceptance of what it really means to achieve liberty and self-governance. Ghanaians, on the other hand, with all our empty boastfulness about being the lodestar of African liberation, have yet to learn what it really means to fight for one’s collective freedom.

What does Nana Akufo-Addo, for example, mean when he observes that “although numerous irregularities characterized [Election 2008], I had to accept the outcome [in order to] allow peace to prevail in the country, and to push the nation’s agenda forward”? Precisely what sort of “irregularities” is he, here, talking about? And exactly who is/are to be squarely held accountable for the same? In other words, for a party in power to be whining as if it had absolutely no clue regarding the effective appropriation of the law and our national security agencies to ensure electoral fairness makes one wonder precisely what the NPP leaders were thinking when they decided to assume the reins of governance.

Indeed, there is not much time between 2009 and 2012, when Ghanaians return to the polls to either renew the contractual mandate of the Atta-Mills government or vote in a new national steward altogether. And the leadership of the New Patriotic Party had better come up with a more meaningful reason for both desiring and deserving the renewal mandate of the Ghanaian electorate. To be certain, it is all well and good for Nana Akufo-Addo to claim to have forged a longstanding friendship with the now-President Atta-Mills. We only hope that Nana Akufo-Addo also fully appreciates the fact that the greater good of our nation necessitates the logical subordination of such personal friendship to the commonweal.

*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 the author of 18 books, including “Ghanaian Politics Today” (Atumpan Publications/lulu.com, 2008). E-mail: okoampaahoofe@aol.com.