Ghana has no 'Socialist Credentials'

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

At the 17th-anniversary celebration of the founding of the so-called National Democratic Congress (NDC), that was recently held at the National Theater in Accra, Vice-President John Dramani Mahama was reported to have assured party faithful and the rest of the country, at large, that the NDC “will deliver on its campaign promises…a socially friendly economy and a nation true to its socialist credentials” (MyJoyOnline.com 6/10/09).

Needless to say, it is this kind of regressive rhetoric that has seen Ghana totter on the brink of downright economic destitution and sociopolitical chaos in the barely six months that the Atta-Mills administration has held the reins of governance. And, in any case, it is not quite clear exactly what the former Bole-Bamboi Member of Parliament means when he rants about the NDC returning Ghana to the dubious status of its “socialist credentials.”

For even the least academically-inclined Ghanaian citizen knows that the so-called National Democratic Congress is anything but a socialist political machinery with a human face. For starters, you cannot talk about your “socialist credentials” when you morbidly, callously and doggedly pursue a humanly insensitive and insane Cash-and-Carry health policy. And what is more, you cannot seriously talk about your “socialist credentials” when you once moved heaven and earth in a quixotic bid to stalling the New Patriotic Party-minted National Health Insurance Scheme (NHIS), by characterizing it as an airy-fairy program.

Then also, you cannot talk about your “socialist credentials” when you call a free-education program for the people, such as seminally and fairly successfully pursued by the Kufuor-led New Patriotic Party (NPP) government, an impracticable task. The again, you cannot credibly speak about your “socialist credentials” when you and your party spearheaded a massively fraudulent privatization of all publicly-owned industries, in the patently incongruous and paradoxical name of capitalist profit margin.

And so it appears that Mr. Mahama was talking about a wholly new and, in all likelihood, a totally unknown breed of socialism that has yet to be propounded and put into practice. Or, perhaps, the man was simply disingenuously playing fast-and-loose with expedient terminologies, hoping that his audience of fellow Ghanaian citizens would be too stolid and daft to catch the drift of such hypocrisy.

What was remarkable about Vice-President Mahama’s speech, however, lay outside both the semantic and rhetorical context of the same. In brief, what was most remarkable about the speech was the venue in which it was presented, the National Theater of Ghana. For other than making for good entertainment, one would have had to stretch the mind beyond the most abstract of utmost absurdities – in Beckettian parlance, at least – in order to make any sense of it, besides the NDC hacks merely using the occasion to shamelessly congratulate themselves and pat one another on the back, as it were, for whatever laudable achievements of the party that Ghanaians have yet to learn about and/or perceive.

What is even more comical is to hear the Vice-President, rather pathetically, assert that the NDC has the human resource to fix our ailing national economy but, in the meantime, the party is in the process of “diagnosing” precisely the cause of such ailment in order to prescribe the appropriate remedy.

On the preceding score, one wonders what the NDC’s manifesto was all about going into the 2008 electioneering campaign. In essence, what the Vice-President is comfortably letting on to eligible Ghanaian voters, now that the Dzelukope and Oguaa Mafia are done with hoodwinking their way back into the august corridors of power, is that the Ghanaian electorate – at least that electoral moiety that cast its ballot for the NDC – is all the dumber for putting Messrs. Atta-Mills and Mahama into and near the Kofi Antubam Chair, respectively.

Ordinarily, one would routinely presume the manifesto of a major political party to be based on expert diagnosis of a country’s socioeconomic, cultural and political problems. Alas, in the case of the kleptocratic NDC – and no pun, whatsoever, is intended here – what we are seeing, by way of a diagnosis, are substantive ministers of state either thievishly and unpatriotically billing their ministries, and the Ghanaian taxpayer, in effect, for such purely domestic and parental expenditures as diapers, tampons for these ministers’ kids and spouses, as well as familial groceries; or in the worst of circumstances, pontifically maligning the very woefully underserved constituents the remediation of whose plight they were appointed.

It was thus quite amusing to recently read an article authored by a UK-based NDC propaganda operative, in which the latter vehemently and disingenuously described one such crooked minister as “a very diligent and successful businessman” prior to him assuming the portfolio which he has so meteorically and recklessly brought into abject disrepute. And you guessed right, dear reader, the writer is the blood relative of the disgraced, evidently gallivanting, minister; the author’s uncle, in fact!

At any rate, at no time in its checkered history could Ghana have been even remotely aptly deemed a socialist state. Under the Convention People’s Party (CPP), for example, in which Vice-President Mahama’s father served as a parliamentarian and a regional minister, what Ghanaians experienced was a populist dictatorship with what might aptly be termed as “welfarist tendencies.” One only needs to conduct a casual study of the profligate and neocolonialist lifestyles of the leaders to get a ruefully sobering sense of the perennial hoodwinking of the Ghanaian electorate by our politicians since 1957.

Then again, isn’t it rather nauseating for any major political player to be smugly casting Ghana in pseudo-socialist light, even when such socialist ideological behemoths as Russia and China are fast moving towards the right of such formidable capitalist economies as the United States, Japan, France and Germany? Indeed, it makes one wonder just what the morally staggering 50-percent of Ghanaians who cast their votes for the NDC saw in such politically bankrupt and intellectually dissipated figures as Messrs. Atta-Mills and Mahama.

*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. He is the author of “Dr. J. B. Danquah: Architect of Modern Ghana” (iUniverse.com, 2005). E-mail: okoampaahoofe@aol.com.