Is Ghana Really "Leaderless"?

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

Recently, his successor to the general-secretaryship of the ruling National Democratic Congress (NDC), Mr. Johnson Asiedu-Nketia, called him "a car thief." The latter also accused Dr. Josiah Aryeh of taking bribes from some unnamed operatives of the main opposition New Patriotic Party (NPP). Dr. Aryeh, now a member of the Konadu Agyeman-Rawlings-founded National Democratic Party (NDP), has threatened to slap Mr. Asiedu-Nketia, popularly known as "General Mosquito," with a defamation lawsuit.

What I am more interested in, right now, is whether Dr. Aryeh can be taken seriously, when the notable legal maven sarcastically asserts that "Ghana is in a state of leaderlessness, despite having a president" (See "Ghana Is 'Leaderless' Under Mahama - Josiah Aryeh" Vibeghana.com 2/16/14). I question the seriousness of Dr. Aryeh because, truth be told, none of the three presidents produced in Fourth-Republican Ghana by the National Democratic Congress can be realistically described as a leader worthy of such signal designation.

Then also, the fact that Dr. Aryeh trucked with the NDC for some two decades, prior to his breakaway with Mrs. Rawlings, does not positively tell about the qualification of this latter-day renegade to lecture Ghanaians on what a leader worthy of such designation looks like or performs on the job. Indeed, I have always insisted, with absolutely no fear of contradiction whatsoever, that the best measure of the leadership competence of former President Jerry John Rawlings is by assessing the performance of his successors to the presidency from among the top-echelons of the National Democratic Congress.

This is primarily because as founding-patriarch of the NDC, Mr. Rawlings has also performed the patently undemocratic role of peremptory elector of that party's presidential candidates, most notably his infamous handpicking of the then-Vice President John Evans Atta-Mills in what became known as The Swedru Declaration. Of course, on the New Patriotic Party (NPP) side, former President John Agyekum-Kufuor can be aptly said to have had his own covert Kumasi Declaration. Or is it Asanteman Declaration? Indeed, it well may have been on the basis of such thinking that one reader of my column recently e-mailed to suggest to me that should Nana Akufo-Addo decide to successfully spoil for the presidency a third time, I may very likely be afforded the benefit of a political appointment or even a cabinet portfolio.

In the recent past, there have also been those who urged me to write fanatically in promotion of the presidential ambitions of Nana Akufo-Addo, because it was the turn of Okyeman to assume the reins of governance. My invariable riposte has been that while, indeed, I am proud of my Akyem heritage, I am even prouder of my Akan heritage; and what is more, I have blood ties linking me with almost every single one of the major Ghanaian ethnic groups. I, therefore, do not have the luxury of being politically and ideologically parochial in purview or perspective.

Anyway, in social science parlance, being leaderless is designated as "Acephalous," that is a society or nation-state without a clearly defined title or position of "Head-of-State" or Monarch or any such geopolitical configuration. At the most fundamental level, almost no West African country has had a more clearly defined leadership regime, in the form of the constitutional monarchy than the Akan people of Ghana. Which is not to imperiously imply that the other non-Akan ethnic groups in the country are any less "Cephalous." What can scarcely be disputed is the fact that the Akan domination of present-day Ghana has been largely due to the relatively far more advanced sociopolitical organization of Akan society. And it is not for nothing that the Akan have constituted the subject of the overwhelming bulk of the sociological literature in the West African sub-region, and continue to attract no mean scholarly, or academic, attention.

When he asserts that Ghana is "leaderless" under President John Dramani Mahama, I do not suppose that Dr. Aryeh means to declare Messrs. Rawlings and Atta-Mills as the gold standard of good and/or competent leadership in Fourth-Republican Ghana, let alone postcolonial Ghana as a whole. He most probably mean to say that Ghanaians are so recklessly undisciplined as to perennially require the whip-lash of a primitive, "revolutionary" slave-driver like Mr. Rawlings to keep them dancing like the marionettes that they have since long been known to have become.

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*Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.
Department of English
Nassau Community College of SUNY
Garden City, New York
Feb. 18, 2014
E-mail: okoampaahoofe@optimum.net
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