9/08
The Guinness Book of
Records should establish a record for the person with the most shaken hand and
the first winner by a mile must be the current (sitting) President of Ghana,
His Excellency John Dramani Mahama. In the course of the past three weeks, and
counting, the President must have shaken more than 10,000 hands. By the time you
read this article The Funeral is almost
over and the number of hands he would have shaken would get him Olympic gold
for the hand shaking category.
President Mills was
famous for shaking the hand of every employee at the Castle at the beginning of
every year; in Ghana we use the handshake as a mark of friendship. However, it
is even more de rigueur
in funeral situations. For President Mahama, the handshaking started from the
moment the late President died because in all our funeral customs failing to
shake the hand of the Chief Mourner raises serious questions about
relationships with the dead and social and cultural continuities among the
living. Shaking every proffered hand was a symbol of friendship towards all and
recognition of everyone’s contribution.
Ghana has matured in
the past three weeks in ways that more than 50 years of statehood had not
prepared us for; as we all know, when a person loses a parent that person has
to learn to behave like an adult because of the loss of parental protection.
Ghana has learnt so stand up and be counted as a fast maturing democracy in the
eyes of the world. US President Barak Obama has led the chorus of praise for
Ghana’s growing democracy describing it as a model for Africa and an article in
the latest issue of The Economist magazine makes the point: “On two occasions in the
past 20 years, power has peacefully changed hands. Elections have been run by a
genuinely independent commission and deemed free and fair. The army is out of
politics. Judges often rule against the government. The handling of the first death
of a leader in office has confirmed the stability of Ghana’s institutions”.
The smooth handling of
the death of President Mills and the subsequent transfer of power to President
Mahama and Vice President Amissah Arthur are unprecedented in Africa. While not
wanting to thump our chest too hard, we can point to transition crisis in at
least ten African countries in recent years where a leader’s death or the
aftermath of presidential elections has led to deaths and suffering. Malawi’s
case is similar to Ghana but handled in a completely different way. When the
former President of Malawi Bingu wa Mutharika died of a heart attack in April
this year his body was apparently taken from his country to South Africa so
that his closest allies could buy time. This shenanigan was undertaken in order
to subvert the national constitution because the Vice President Joyce Banda had
fallen out with the late President whose allies wanted to install his brother,
Professor Mutharika, the Foreign Minister, as the new leader. Fortunately for
Malawians, some ministers in the Cabinet and the military brass refused to go
along with the plot and Joyce Banda was allowed to ascend to the top job.
The morale of the
Malawian and Ghanaian “case studies” is that Africa will become stable if we
allow our institutions to work. Every instance of instability and strife in the
continent has come about through an attempt to subvert the constitution in some
way. This was the case in Kenya, Zimbabwe, Cote d’Ivoire, Guinea Bissau, and
most recently in Mali, just to cite a few cases. It is a lesson that Ghana must
learn and take to heart and assume as a national credo. We will only progress
if we allow our institutions to work, and change things that do not work to make
them work. That is the only way.
This is a lesson that
we can learn even from the recent sad but heroic events. It is obvious that
this being an unprecedented situation a lot of improvisation was done, usually
based on a combination of constitutional guidance and traditional practices.
However, there were new situations that neither the Constitution nor tradition
alone could provide answers or even guidelines. For example, according to most
Ghanaian cultural traditions the burial of a dead body is the sole business of
the “family”. Here family has several meanings, but generally speaking, it
refers to the deceased’s paternal antecedents. In a situation where a person is
so obviously a national figure, decision making would have to go beyond the
family, but balance and proportion are important sensitivities in this respect.
What the government and
nation have gone through should be systemised into a loose protocol template
that can be used in similar situations. The public and even much of the media
have not been privy to the behind-the-scenes negotiations and discussions about
the funeral but snippets of unconfirmed information lead to the conclusion that
there were muddled moments regarding the burial, especially the eventual
destination of the body. Perhaps, some amount of wrangling would be a feature
of any such funeral but it can be minimized if there is broad public
understanding of what is happening or expected to happen. Take the funeral of
any traditional ruler: mostly the process is unwritten but moves with clockwork
precision because everyone knows the functions and offices of the process, and
information is provided to all stakeholders.
The formation of a
Planning Committee to plan and oversee the funeral has become part of the
Ghanaian way of doing things but are there not state institutions that have the
mandate to do these things? The worry that leads to this question stems from
the lack of institutional accountability with the formation of ad hoc committees
for such huge and national undertakings, and this is without questioning the
competence or commitment of the members of the committee. One of the lessons
learnt from the Ghana at 50 celebrations must be that a more institutionalised pattern of representation
would have saved the nation some of the embarrassment that has turned memories
of the golden jubilee so sour for many people. At the risk of sounding like a
broken gramophone, one has to repeat: We must allow the institutions of state
to work.
Money, especially
public money, is an important issue in every such undertaking and it is even
more so in our specific circumstances when it is such short supply. Ideally,
the budget must anticipate such unforeseen events and make provision for them
so that such expenses are covered even before they are spent. This would also
ensure that they are being spent by appropriately mandated authority and
institutions. Perhaps, this was the case in this situation otherwise the right
things must be done so that the memory of our President’s funeral does not
become one of a political row over money.
In the same vein, we
must honour the memory of President Mills in a lasting and fitting manner, but
the naming of streets and roundabouts and suchlike must be done more systematically
and institutionally. We all feel very embarrassed that we hardly use location
addresses in this country, preferring instead to locate places by using trees
and kiosks as markers. So, there is the need to sort this mess properly. More
importantly, it is important to create a heritage system that includes naming
streets, buildings and other monuments in memory of important personalities and
events, but this has to be done properly, if we want the names to endure. People
of a certain age would recall that in the wake of two sudden and violent
deaths, the Accra International Airport and a roundabout in Accra were named
after General Emmanuel Kotoka in 1967 and Captain Thomas Sankara 20 years
later. While Kotoka remains the name of the Airport (with serious contentions
from some quarters), Sankara has disappeared as a name from the map of Accra.
President Kufuor named a street in Accra after the Nigerian leader Olusegun
Obasanjo although I don’t know of anyone who calls it by that name. It is ok to
show emotions but things done in emotional moments do not always endure.
Taking all for all,
this nation has conducted itself with maturity, unity and purposefulness. In
church, it is at this point that the pastor tells the congregation: shake the
hand of the person standing to your left and right and say a blessing. Ghana
should do this to itself.
gapenteng@zoho.com
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kgapenteng.blogspot.com
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