The Presidency is Not for the Lethargic and Brain-Dead!

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

I wouldn’t take the opinion of any District Chief Executive Officer (DCE) on our current four-year presidential electoral system seriously, especially in a case where such an official advocates the extension of the current presidential term by a year or two. Not even two minutes! And my reason, obviously, hinges on the fact that as veritable government appointees who are not directly accountable to the people for their stewardship, DCEs have a vested interest in the entrenchment of the presidency.

In short, the fact that they are not democratically elected makes DCEs very poor advocates of their own cause. Consequently, the call by Mr. Thomas Osei Bonsu, the Asante-Akyem North District Chief Executive, for the extension of the current four-year presidential term must be deemed with utmost suspicion. This is not, in any way, about political partisanship. In reality, it is the far greater interest of our entire nation that is at stake. And so far, almost none of the arguments advanced in favor of extending our current four-year presidential term holds water, as it were.

For instance, Mr. Bonsu claims that “when the New Patriotic Party government, led by former President Kufuor took over from the then-National Democratic Congress government, it was only during the middle of the second year that ‘it was able to settle down’ to initiate projects” (See “DCE Pushes For Extension Of The Presidential Term Of Office” MyJoyOnline.com 6/23/10).

In effect, what the Asante-Akyem North DCE is telling us is that President Kufuor was not quite prepared to assume the reins of governance when he eagerly presented himself to the Ghanaian electorate as a viable alternative to both Messrs. Rawlings and Atta-Mills. Else, in the implicit opinion of Mr. Bonsu, the now-former President Kufuor would have already neatly laid out his gubernatorial strategy, including a comprehensive list of his cabinet appointees and other prospective senior government appointees with whom he intended to steer our ship of state, the moment he was ceded Mr. Kofi Antubam’s majestic chair.

Instead, it appears that, by Mr. Bonsu’s own account, Mr. Kufuor had flagrantly wasted the previous four years as an opposition leader by simply caviling the Rawlings-led NDC government, without formulating any substantive political agenda. If the preceding argument has validity, then, in reality, it was Mr. Kufuor who did not seem to have been initially quite up to the hectic task of governance, and not, in any way, the fact that the now-former president had been presented with a short temporal span within which to prove his mettle, as it were, by fully and swiftly implementing his policy agenda.

And here, also, we must quickly point out that it is not wholly accurate that former President Kufuor first mooted the idea of a 5-year presidential term during his last speech to the Ghanaian parliament. Actually, it was several months before that and it was in the immediate wake of a dinner invitation hosted by then-Nigerian president Olusegun Obasanjo at which this outrageous proposal had, apparently, been broached by the two men. Highly likely, this morbidly regressive idea was mooted by Mr. Obasanjo and almost spontaneously lauded by the Ghanaian leader acting like the chorus of a Greek drama. And indeed, keen observers of West African politics would shortly witness the Biafran War veteran inelegantly attempt to finesse his country’s democratic constitution for his own purposes. Fortunately, this benighted attempt at “constitutional dictatorship” was foiled.

For his part, Mr. Kufuor, ever the great and bosom friend of dictators and strongmen (witness, for instance, his tacky and debonair attitude towards the Bashir regime during the most recent Sudanese electoral charade) left the Obasanjo dinner an evidently fanatical convert of remarkable eloquence and began, almost immediately, to outrageously espouse the same. And when it soon became apparent that like his Nigerian opposite number, Ghanaians were not about to allow their hard-won sovereignty to be manipulated by a suave mischief-maker, Mr. Kufuor then curiously and gratuitously began to impudently promote the interest of his putative political opponents against that of the presidential nominee of his own party, the New Patriotic Party. As I vividly recall, at the time I was so incensed and flabbergasted that I wrote and published an article vehemently demanding to know if Uncle Kofi Diawuo had been fed a banned substance by his oil-rich host as to make his head spin out of control, and his mind play tricks with the reality of an emergent albeit immutable Ghanaian democratic culture. Anyway, the notion advanced by Mr. Bonsu that, somehow, anybody who argues against the possible extension of Fourth-Republican presidential term of office is, perforce, purely arguing from a disadvantaged position on the margins of the ideological opposition, is rather unimaginative, to say the least. And my simple riposte is this: Can you imagine the magnitude of damage that would have been wreaked upon an already fragile Ghanaian economy, if the tenure of President Rawlings had been extended to 2002 or even 2004? Go figure!

*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. A Governing Board Member of the Accra-based Danquah Institute (DI), Okoampa-Ahoofe was also the first winner of the John J. Reyne Artistic Achievement Award in English Poetry, City College of New York of the City University of New York (CCNY of CUNY), 1988. E--mail: okoampaahoofe@optimum.net. ###