Post Election Blues in Ghana

The 2012 Ghanaian elections are finally over, and what have we gained? Absolutely nothing! There were no fundamental differences between the various parties and their candidates running for the presidency and membership in parliament. Without exception, and despite their populist rhetoric, none of the candidates or their parties represented the genuine class interests of the majority of Ghanaians who continue to suffer from a neo-colonial economy plagued with unemployment, poverty, disease, and misery. None of the presidential or parliamentary candidates articulated anything that would suggest their understanding of the urgent need for a revolutionary transformation in Ghana—for the urgent need to dismantle an economic system that allows Ghana’s immense wealth to benefit the international corporate elite and their local partners, the Ghanaian indigenous bourgeoisie who help to facilitate the former’s theft.

The 2012 Ghanaian elections were a mere showcase of just how useless and damaging it is for us, in Africa, to keep trying to copy an alien system of governance: multiparty, western style democracy. Pure nonsense! These elections, which we are forced to endure every 4-5 years, only serve to obstruct national integration, undermine national stability, and allow for the winning party to siphon as much of the national wealth as they possibly can into the pockets of top party officials and their friends and cronies. Indeed, elections in Africa are extremely divisive, disruptive, and destructive—not to mention abhorrently wasteful and expensive! Party candidates use the ethnic divide to win favour among certain sectors of the electorate; the party that wins power, based on this ‘winner takes all’ system of governance, discontinues the projects and programmes of its predecessors and sacks the senior management of all of the top agencies and ministries of the former government, regardless of their level of competency or the contributions they may have been making to the nation; and, finally, to gain power, the followers of the various parties are unleashed into a violent battle of destruction, leading to property damage, personal injury, and even death.

Ironically, this election madness that we go through every 4-5 years—which is always rife with corruption, rigging, bribing and violence—is so expensive that African governments, including Ghana’s own, can’t even afford to conduct them without the external funding of their western donors.[1] And because these elections provide such a huge obstacle to Africa’s development, the western donors are always eager to help finance them!

Until Africa builds its system of governance on the foundation of its own political culture, we will find it impossible to achieve national integration, political stability, or economic development. Multiparty, western style democracy—where you jump up every 4-5 years to shout insults at your opponent—does not even work well for the United States and the other western nations that have been practicing it for centuries. How, then, can it do anything for us!

It should be crystal clear, by now, that the only hope for Ghana and the rest of Mother Africa is in unity and socialism. Osagyefo Dr. Kwame Nkrumah demonstrated years ago that the optimal size of development of Ghana, or of any of the balkanized states of Africa is Africa itself. It is only when Africa’s vast mineral wealth, agricultural potential, and abundantly youthful population is integrated and organized on a continental basis, under an All-African Socialist Government, will the aspirations of the masses of African people, at home and abroad, be fully realized.

[1] 7 million euro grant the European Union gave Ghana for its 2012 elections.
Citifm Online lists the same amount in dollars, at $10,000,000.00 in the following article: Accept Election Results – EU Advises.