Editorial: Ghana's sinking image and relevance in African leadership

TODAY is African Union Day, a day set aside to remind ourselves of the dream of our founding fathers that one day this continent of some one billion people must unite and for us to recount our steps and renew our commitment to that goal. However, it is also a period of Ghana’s lowest standing in the comity of nations.

Since President Mills took over from January 7, 2009, he has made no discernable policy advancement towards the quest for integration. Considering the conducive democratic continental environment, Mills is proving to be the worst Ghanaian leader for the unification project. There is a serious leadership paralysis from Ghana now.

Indeed, he has treated AU summits and the like as less important than an invitation to commission a borehole. He skipped an important AU summit in January 2010 only to go to South Africa (for a World Cup match) but ostensibly to visit President Jacob Zuma to discuss issues about the next AU summit! Unfortunately for him he got to South Africa at the time that President Zuma had left for a scheduled invite to a G20/G8 summit. Gone are the Kufuor days when Ghana was a regular invitee to such events.

Ghana’s standing has fallen so low that diplomats say that comments from our leader at regional and continental summits receive very little attention. He agrees to a decision only to change his mind. President Mills, a so-called Nkrumaist, has shown no appetite for the big dream of a united Africa. He feels safer wallowing in symbolic gestures like Founder’s Day and FPSO Osagyefo, but has shown no energy in doing the things that can get us united.

Indeed, exactly two years to the day that he was inaugurated, President Mills made a most regrettable diplomatic blunder when he spoke directly against an ECOWAS communiqué to push the defeated but intransigent Laurent Gbagbo from office. He told the whole world that he was against military force to enforce the democratic will of the Ivorians and that Ghana was minding its own business, ‘Dzi wo fie asem.’

Indeed, many analysts blame the ambivalence and tacit support of leaders like Mills as what gave Gbagbo the fuel to stay on, leading to over a thousand people dying and over a million rendered refugees. In the end it took military action to get rid of Gbagbo and install Alassane Ouattara, only for our President who has made propaganda an art of governance to seek to take credit for the clearing up of a mess he contributed to.

Last week, the New Statesman reported that powerful elements in la Cote d’Ivoire were accusing President JEA Mills of Ghana of shielding pro-Gbagbo dissidents and alleged war criminals still bent on overthrowing the new Ouattara government.

The 14 May edition of the newspaper Le Patriote, accused President Mills of being “guilty” in what appears to be a coup conspiracy against Ghana’s neighbour. The report questioned, what it called, “the silence of Ghana’s head of state, John Atta Mills, because Ghana seems to be complicit in what has every appearance of a coup in preparation.”

It continued, “For a country as democratic as Ghana, to serve as a base to destabilize a democratically elected president of another country is really incomprehensible.”

Around the same time, another report on the website of the New Forces, (www.fninfo.ci), Prime Minister Guillaume Soro’s former rebel group, carried a similar story against Ghana, with the headline, “Le silence coupable d’un pays frère”, or “The guilty silence of a brother country.” Earlier, on May 11, another independent newspaper, Info Soir, reported that it was President Mills who prevailed on the chairman of the Constitutional Court, Yao N’Dre, to return to Cote d’Ivoire to swear the duly elected Alassane Ouattara in.

According to the New Forces, “Since the capture of the former Ivorian head of state, most of the chiefs of the former regime who were able to escape the mesh of Republican Forces of Côte d'Ivoire (FRCI) took refuge in Ghana, a brother border to the east of Côte d'Ivoire.”

The New Forces further accused Ghana of allowing these alleged “dissidents to be using Ghana to launch calls for hatred and popular uprising against the Ouattara government, without the high authorities of Ghana stopping this mess.”

Is this how low Ghana has fallen? That we will be accused of supporting acts of instability against a neighbouring West African state? Peace, stability, and democracy are seen as necessary for Africa’s integration. The least that Ghana can do under Mills is to help bring back peace and stability in our region.

Once that simple matter is safeguarded, Ghanaians can exercise their franchise to choose a new leader who can show commitment, real commitment, to the integration process. The 350 million or so people in our region are only asking for the freedom to move freely, trade freely, across borders.