What Are Irrelevant Promises, Justice Crabbe?

By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.
English Department, SUNY-Nassau
Garden City, New York
December 25, 2016
E-mail: okoampaahoofe@optimum.net

While addressing members of the Parliamentary Training Institute, recently, the venerable Justice VCRAC Crabbe was reported to have suggested that elected presidents must abandon electioneering campaign promises that, once elected, they came to deem to be irrelevant (See “Elected Presidents Can Abandon Irrelevant Promises – VCRAC Crabbe” MyJoyOnline.com / Ghanaweb.com 12/25/16). It is not clear in what context the highly respected Commissioner of the Statute Law Review Commission made the statement attributed to him. It is also difficult to pin the retired nonagenarian jurist to any specifics because he does not appear, at least from the news report, to have given specific examples of what he meant by “irrelevant campaign promises.”

Whatever the case may be, my terse response is that if a particular electioneering campaign promise brought in the desired number of votes, then, of course, an elected president has a bounden obligation to reckon such a promise as significant and one that is worth fulfilling, especially if that elected president or leader is likely to return to the voters and/or their electors four years down the pike, as Americans are wont to say, for a renewal of his/her mandate. Even where an elected president is a lame-duck who does not have or need to return to the people for the renewal of his/her mandate, that leader ought to think seriously about the electoral fortunes of his successor in deciding on which campaign promises to give the topmost priority to and which not to accord the same level of high priority.
When I read the news report, the first thought that crossed my mind was the hope that Justice Crabbe did not have President-Elect Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo in mind when he made his advisory remark. In reality, the onus of the fulfillment of any campaign promises does not rest with only the elected presidential candidate, it also rests with each and every one of the elected leaders on the ticket of the political party on whose electioneering campaign platform such promises were made. Thus, for example, any campaign promises made by Nana Akufo-Addo in the lead-up to Election 2016, are also equally binding on all the parliamentary candidates who ran on the same party ticket and electioneering campaign platform with the former New Patriotic Party’s Member of Parliament for Akyem-Abuakwa South.

What this means is that President-Elect Akufo-Addo may need to take stock of each and every electioneering campaign promise with all the elected parliamentarians on the ticket of the soon-to-be-ruling New Patriotic Party. The most practicable decision would be to apportion each and every one of these campaign promises among these locally elected representatives of the people for fulfillment. In a bid to broadening the scope of his national development agenda, President-Elect Akufo-Addo could even rope in those parliamentarians of the defeated National Democratic Congress (NDC) whom he finds to be patriotically principled enough to be willing to put aside partisan ideological differences in order to work assiduously towards the rapid advancement of Ghanaian society at large.

Justice Crabbe was also dead on the money, as it were, when he admonished the members of the incoming Akufo-Addo Administration not to abandon projects initiated by the departing Mahama-led regime of the National Democratic Congress. I would even go as far as to include NPP-initiated projects, under the tenure of President John Agyekum-Kufuor, that were recklessly and unwisely abandoned by the Mills-Mahama and, subsequently, the Mahama/Amissah-Arthur Administration. But, of course, as always, the decision of which abandoned projects to be afforded priority on the list of projects to be resuscitated must be based on cost-effectiveness, viability and relevance for the national development agenda.

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