“Free and fair elections were not enough, they had to be matched with institutions of good governance – the rule of law, a free judiciary and freedom of speech. The status quo is simply not sustainable”.
—Hillary Clinton, US Secretary of State
“The task of the government is not only to pour honey into a cup, but sometimes to give bitter medicine. But this should always be done openly and honestly, and then the overwhelming majority of people will understand their government.”
–Vladimir Putin, Russian Prime Minister
Up till today, nobody knows the ‘salaries’ of the ‘public officers’ mentioned in article 71 of the Constitution quoted above. They are obviously considered state security secrets. The issue of past presidents’ entitlements continues to generate more heat than light. Besides these, there are others not mentioned in the Constitution who are also enjoying outlandish salaries, pensions and gratuities. For example, officers of Bank of Ghana above certain rank leave office on their salaries while officers of the Armed Forces from colonel and above all retire on their salaries. Because of ‘the winner takes all’ political system, there are many public servants, through no fault of theirs, who are on permanent interdiction or are ‘standing aside’ on one leg, and yet are enjoying their full benefits like normal state employees. Some of them wait for a regime favourable to them to come back to power for them to be given back their positions or promoted to their highest level of inefficiency in different establishments. That is another source of madness which has descended on the nation.
How long can the nation bear such heavy financial burden without an artery snapping in the brain of the nation? What greater madness is this? The critical mass of the whole hullaballoo is the greed of the educated black man in leadership position and the incompetence and corruption with which he or she brings to an entrusted position of responsibility. Under all circumstances, all the holders of the positions listed above and those not listed are persons who on regular basis interact with the rich and the poor of the society. They are persons whose office gives them enormous opportunities to provide patronage to their fellow citizens. Like the biblical story, for every 10 who receive patronage from such office holders, it is likely that one of them will turn round to acknowledge such patronage at a later date. In effect, there is no way any of the aforementioned office holders should go hungry in retirement if indeed such office holder performed his functions to the best of his or her ability without favour and malice or bias.
Besides the huge amount of legal ‘bush allowances’ which go with those positions, their positions also make them lobbyist dream. The Constitution provides a loop hole for any president about to retire to rewrite the quantum of ‘salaries’ and retirement benefits due him to his advantage and to the disadvantage of the suffering masses of the country. And to give respectability and some hollow legitimacy to a clear case of conflict of interest situation, the Constitution drafters provided a disingenuous scheme where the Executive and Legislature could enter into an unholy and illegal co-habitation, giving them the opportunity to scratch each other’s back in turns in an act which will make any of the Shakespeare’s comedy look like a tragedy.
If the provisions of the Constitution quoted above are highly offensive, obscene, filthy and oppressive bordering on madness, the way and manner they have been implemented by the Executive and the Legislature in the past amount to a betrayal of trust and the innocent, good natured and vulnerable citizens who spent time queuing up to vote them into power. The Executive and the Legislature under both NDC and NPP administrations have ingeniously exploited the conflict of interest axiom to profit from those two provisions of the Constitution. There is nothing in the Constitution which says EVERY president should appoint his own committee or for that matter, a president should wait till the last minute when he is about to leave office to appoint such a committee which, as we have seen, consists of loyalists.
Should every president constitute a committee to look at the matter afresh once he is about to leave office? Do we have to improve on the conditions of an immediate outgoing president, compared to the one preceding him? Should any improvement automatically affect the immediate past president? Do we even need that provision at all? Is there no better and more acceptable way of dealing with the matter? Why is it that none of our past presidents or any member of the Legislature ever came out boldly against those provisions? Should a person who could not put up a house each in the nation’s capital and his home village or a place of his choice, in his lifetime, be allowed to campaign for the high office of presidency? Should we not consider such a person a failure who is not fit to govern this country? Where do we draw the line between needs, wants and wishes so that we can define what constitute greed and avarice?
Articles 68 and 71 should be modified with all the urgency needed to avoid the daylight robbery perpetrated by the Executive and the Legislature. In putting those provisions in the Constitution, the framers conveniently forgot about the poor downtrodden workers, housewives and school children who have to wait at filthy bus stops, endlessly waiting hopelessly for the grossly inefficient and inadequate public transportation system every morning and evening. The framers deliberately forgot the needless deaths occurring at our hospitals with rapid succession because of lack of simple affordable equipment and tools and inadequate medical personnel. The fact that the current beneficiaries have kept stolid silence and allowed their political bootlickers to fight on their behalf clearly indicates the greed, the avarice and the political lasciviousness driving our present day leaders. This is a nation which has lost its head and has been enveloped by huge madness.
It is clearly a case of madness and an act of satanic demagogue which the Ever Merciful and Gracious Allah will surely frown upon for a poor, third world, bankrupt nation like Ghana to “honour” a retiring President with a hefty gratuity, five bullet proof limousines at any point in time, two presidential mansions which will pass on to his beneficiaries on his death, a coterie of household and office staff paid by the state, fully paid two annual overseas trips, an amount to establish a foundation, salary for the spouse and a host of unwarranted benefits. Even Singapore which is in a position to do that for her revered leader, Lee Kuan Yew, cannot dream of such a package, let alone write it into her Constitution.
The basis of rapid development and growth is a society free from corruption and indiscipline. All the leaders we have had since independence had enough opportunities to either lay the foundation or rid the society of these two cankers but they woefully failed. All the leaders we have had had the opportunity to leave Ghana a better place than they found it but they all woefully failed. The late General Murital Mohammed of Nigeria ruled for only seven moths and yet he is the only Nigerian leader with a nationwide acceptance. There is no major city or town which has not named a street after him. After 55 years of independence, Ghana remains a poor beggar nation relying on former colonial masters to survive. Indeed, during the last years of both President J.J. Rawlings’s NDC administration and President J.A. Kufuor’s NPP administration, the country recorded the lowest mark on the Transparency International’s well respected and internationally recognized Corruption Perspective Index (CPI). After three years in power, President Mills’s NDC administration has recorded the same lowly score of 3.9. During those periods, the country was deemed to be among some of the most corrupt nations in the world. Do we honour failure and mediocrity or valour and achievement? Perhaps, a cynical question to ask is: “Can the ‘friends’ who paid for the education of President Rawlings’s children and the renovation of President Kufuor’s house and the construction of security post for President Mills while in office not look after them in retirement?”
It brings back to mind what Busumuru Kofi Annan, former Secretary-General of the United Nations once said: “Many countries (in Africa), the wrong kind, have made it to leadership. They see power for the sake of power and for their own aggrandisement, rather than a real understanding of the need to use power to improve their countries. The quality of the leaders, the misery they have brought to their people and my inability to work with them to turn the situation round are very depressing, unless we find a way of getting them to focus on resolving conflicts and turn to key issues of economic and social development, the effort that we are all making will be for naught”. The Busumuru’s statement is complemented by another statement made by Prof. Sule Gambari, the former Nigerian Under Secretary at the United Nations: “Africa failed to produce a productive middle class but instead had produced parasitic elite that lived off the fat of the land through non-productive activities on political patronage”. The acts of omission and commission of our leaders, past and present, depict the thoughts of these two great international personalities.
If today, President Rawlings and President Kufuor are held in high esteem by the western world, it should be seen as acts of hypocrisy. The western worlds are behaving like that not because these two leaders succeeded in lifting their citizens from abject poverty to the door step of prosperity, no! It was because the two, in their own way, packaged and marketed a product very rare on the underdeveloped, poor African continent They held elections and handed over power peacefully to the opposition when their respective terms of office expired, based on the oath they had sworn to uphold and a normal democratic practice which is taken for granted in the advanced western worlds, pure and simple. THE END.
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By Kwame Gyasi