It's Not What You Want To Sell

...It’s What People Want To Buy

It was the longest ballot paper ever seen in Ghana, aspirant Dan Botwe declared, after chanting a war song as a prelude to his credential-laden speech. The five minute allotted time was perhaps the shortest a presidential aspirant has ever had to sell his vision to lead a country. Yet everybody had their turn. Some of them had time to sing. Others quoted biblical scripture. A few quoted some great speakers and one of them gave a rendition of how a boxing commentary of the contest with the opposition would sound. There was also a bland football commentary; the aspirant had forgotten that a typical football game is played by eleven men, not 17. Nearly all the aspirants decided to play to their positions on the ballot paper, an innovation that added fun to the programme. But the event also had its serious moments. In full-throated ease, candidate Kwabena Agyapong admonished delegates with the eloquence of a medieval nightingale: “The significance of what you are about to do today should not be lost on you.” So, when at the end of it all there wasn’t a déjà vu moment to savour, the significance of a new beginning dawned on the followers of the Danquah-Busia tradition. Nana Addo Danquah Akuffo-Addo is the new leader of the New Patriotic Party. No questions; just answers.

Perhaps, Nana Addo himself was the Déjà vu factor in the contest. The NPP establishment had not put him forward as the candidate of choice, but in more than one way, the contest had been between him and the others. So, there had been talk of the President’s candidate and the party’s candidate since the race began. But it had remained an open race that employed so much pomp and pageantry, promising surprises and shocks, as aspirants pitted money and brains against one another. Ambitions had failed to dim, making the contest a lot tighter than predicted. At a point, it became difficult to dismiss the thought that any of the 17 aspirants could emerge winner, even though the miserable end of some of them had already been realized from the beginning of the race.

Even so, nobody expected that Dr Arthur Kennedy would commit the equivalent of $25,000, design giant billboards and tour over 200 constituencies for just one vote. That feat gave a mean definition to participatory democracy. It makes you wonder whether his participation in the race was worthwhile. Not that his speech was the most uninspiring; indeed, it didn’t look as if a speech the quality of Martin Luther King’s I have a Dream or Margaret Thatcher’s The Lady is not for Turning, could have altered the fate of events on the day. In a voice that sounded triumphantly feminine yet tenderly masculine, Arthur Kennedy recounted the days of old when he marched from the Commonwealth Hall of University of Ghana, protesting injustices in society. He was quick to justify his claim to the highest office of the land, even though he had been living abroad for nearly two decades. He had been exiled on two occasions; he had come back to share in the glory his efforts have produced. It was difficult to put a clear theme to his speech, but he had a message to sell, and he sold it quite satisfactorily.

But the contest, in the words of Vice President Aliu Mahama, was not about what was on sale; it was about what the people would want to buy. The assistant headmaster, as he preferred to call himself on that occasion, cast aside his soft-gentleman exterior and made a spirited rational debate. He had been a deputy president for seven years. He had been president of the republic during his boss’s many travels outside the country. He has managed to stay afloat the political waters, avoiding serious scandal while performing the role of a dutiful assistant. If the natural order of things were to be obeyed, a headmaster would naturally hand over to an assistant. What candidate Aliu forgot was that nature had little part to play in the NPP’s flagbearership race; it had everything to do with nurture. His boss was reported to be nurturing the dreams of one man, and that man was not him, as loyal as he has been, but a fine Asante-Fante specimen, who is also called John. Nevertheless, his performance was not bad; he managed a third place with 146 votes. His confidence in the electoral system may have been bruised, but his honour is not abused.

Alan Kyeremanteng had declared at the Kasoa rally that the name John meant more than an identity in Ghanaian politics. John Rawlings had handed over to John Kofour, and with John Mills waiting to do battle, another John in his person fits the NPP’s bill. Not the most convincing of arguments, but he was quite convincing at the Legon Congress. His name had become a byword for cash-spilling in the contest, and his advertisements had not failed to cash in on that. He was rumored to have littered cash to delegates on his campaign tours, surviving a car accident that killed two members of his team. He had hired a helicopter for some of his rounds while his compatriots used the roads. He had been news from the beginning, and he was news at the congress grounds, too. It was alleged that one Afoko, his assistant, was distributing $1,500 to influence delegates while voting was going on. Voting had been suspended for hours. As unproven as it remains, the bribery allegation represents the careless disembowelment of the filth that has accumulated in the tubes at the laboratory where our democracy is being experimented. Needless to say, the experiment needs working on everyday.

Alan’s speech was not a terrible one. It did not compare with Earl Spencer’s eulogy of Princess Diana, the Princess of Wales, but it had a character to it. A moment’s silence for the people who have lost their lives in the campaign was enough to drive home the point that the exercise wasn’t all about money; it was about people. And he did well to exploit that sentiment to his advantage. His acknowledgement of his toils in the party as a young man did not fail to register on the hearts of the listeners, but it was difficult to tell if anybody thought that was enough to win votes. So, when he sang the winner song at the end of it all, factions knew he could well be singing a different tune after the ballot. The winner tune was Nana’s to sing. You wouldn’t say he made a farce of that song.

Akufo Addo’s victory did not shock Alan’s team the way an Alan victory would have banished the political dinosaur in the former to extinction. The turf was familiar to him. That is how he started his speech: “In 1998, I made a request before you in Sunyani to lead the party, you rejected my request.” What followed was some veiled praise for President Kufour. He had supported him and served his government in the two most important departments of Foreign Service and Attorney General. He had not been sacked; he bowed out to make another attempt at the leadership bid. He had pooled more than 600 votes in 1998, and Kofi Apraku, the other person among the 17 aspirants who had contested in that year’s race, had managed only a handful of votes. If politics is about numbers, then those old numbers would count. And they did help the Abuakwa legislator to win. He won a battle he would respect all his political life. Nana Addo did not just win over other candidates; he won over three things: money, factionalism and influence.

Did Nana win over brains? He didn’t come across as the candidate with the best message. His Alisa Hotel speech at the beginning of his campaign did not say how different things would be under his presidency. Indeed, the word change was not mentioned in a single instance in the entire speech. It was a swoop on his beliefs and achievements. Media connoisseurs hailed it as a fantastic speech. This time, he sought to navigate his way into the conscience of the delegates. It was an appeal for votes, not a message about his vision for the country. It was the opposite of Prof Frimpong-Boateng’s poverty eradication message. His’ was a beautifully crafted speech that hit a crescendo right from the very beginning. There are 6.5billion people on earth, and the poorest among them live in Africa. Ghana is gifted with resources, yet 80% of what we consume is imported: from toothpick to aeroplanes. The average Ghanaian is a poor man. He had come to save the situation. His last sentence was a warning: “vote Frimpong-Boateng, else Ghana will not forgive you.” That effort won the renowned heart surgeon only 12 votes.

Perhaps, great ideas and good policies were not going to matter much in this NPP flagbearership contest. Media reports on the campaigns of the aspirants had concentrated on the role of money in the contest. The coinage monecracy had gained currency overnight. Even where the policies of aspirants were highlighted, they were only employed as counterbalancing measures rather than genuine expression of intent. And aspirants and their supporters had played to the gallery, raising questions about campaign funds and the use of state resources. Candidate Hackman Agyemang had seized a radio station to complain about the use of an aircraft while Alan Kyeremanteng had justified payment of money to delegates as reimbursement for traveling costs. Other candidates made distasteful allusions to unfair executive influence. If these were pre-congress concerns that were tolerated because we had been forced to make allowance for unhealthy competition, they were issues that were poignantly articulated by some aspirants on congress day. Prof Frimpong-Boateng had told delegates in his speech: “Ghana is not for sale”, an aspersion that carried with it a quick reference to an already known subject. It was, therefore, not surprising that delegates cheered when Jake Obetsebi-Lamptey stated in the opening sentence of his speech that payments delegates had received were rewards for their work to the party. Was it to follow that those aspirants who had paid the handsomest rewards to the delegates were to carry the day?

Of course, the delegates had the most important say in this love affair. They had come to congress already wooed and won over to say yes on the voting day; in much the same way as a bride would say I do to a groom on a wedding, even if a better suitor shows up. Like brides, delegates were not going to change their minds on account of a good speech or wads of cash on the most important day of their lives. So, Boakye Agyarko’s impressive economic message or Alan Cash’s cash were good post-wedding presents that delegates would digest later. Mark how Dan Botwe’s misplaced Oburumankoma song failed to reverberate in the Great Hall. Even Addo Kufour’s laughable pronunciation of Kokorodo, instead of Kukrudu, did not excite anybody. This was an election that was to be won ‘one touch’, a term Nana Addo only had used. And it was his to win it on a touch.