Even events in faraway Libya, with which Ghana does not share a common border, and the attendant indirect effects of the conflict on us, add to the shortcomings of the infamous policy as unfurled by President Mills.
President Mills, at the time he laid out his unconventional policy, sought to obviate what he ostensibly foresaw as negative repercussions on Ghana.
He avoided a robust statement supportive of those of others in the sub-region, even as he sought to present another picture of a President standing shoulder-to-shoulder with his colleagues in the ECOWAS regional body.
By the lame support for ECOWAS, he provided a political lifeline for the drowning Laurent Gbagbo to hold on to.
It is interesting to note that only the likes of Mugabe and Yoweri Museveni offered this kind of obnoxious lifelines. It is shameful that Mills would want to join this class of African tyrants who are using fear to rule.
The contradictory posture of Mills made mockery of a country which was a leader in sub-regional and continental affairs, brokering peace and partaking in crucial conferences.
That enviable position has long been gone with this caricature of a foreign policy whose shortcomings have seen its proponent running literally for cover in the comity of civilized nations guided by the principle of a globalised world and, if we like it, internationalism.
In the midst of the cacophonous defence put up by the president’s propagandists, the matter did not receive the desired informed debate when he spewed it.
It is instructive that now that the realities are beginning to dawn on us, a better picture is being presented to those for whom foreign policy issues are but grey areas, the preserve of academics and politicians.
The number of refugees entering Ghana, we are told, exceeds the imagination of immigration officers at the entry points. With the country’s international obligations regarding refugees unflinching, we cannot shut our doors on the fleeing persons.
Indeed, as the fighting gathers momentum and transforming eventually into a full-fledged civil war, the repercussions would become even more pronounced as the days go by and the foolhardiness of Gbagbo continues.
We are saddened by the fact that the embarrassments suffered by the country as a result of the infamous ‘dzi wo fie asem’ and the futile attempts at justifying it by government propagandists have resonated in the international community.
There are speculations that President Mills’s inability to turn up for the crucial ECOWAS emergency meeting in Abuja last week was informed by the lost face emanating from the unnecessary pronouncement on the Ivorian issue.
Vice President John Mahama represented our President at the meeting, a turn of events which attracted various interpretations.
The earnest management of the Ivorian issue and the regional grouping’s decision to seek the intervention of the UN, the first time such a request is being made, underscores the magnitude of the challenge on hand.
As the policy lies upside down, its proponent and propagandists who sought to give it a clean face can only cover their faces in shame if they indeed have shame boxes.
