By Ikechukwu Amaechi
Published: January 13, 2009
My article last week – Kufuor: My Man Of The Year – elicited quite some attention-grabbing responses. The most interesting for me, however, was from an anonymous fellow, who disagreed with me. “Amaechi, you got it wrong. Your man of the year should have been Dr kwado Afari-Gyan for conducting election after election without a hitch. President Kufuor came in through the same incorruptible system so he, more or less, had no choice but to hands off like Jerry Rawlings did when he won in 2000. It is Dr Afari-Gyan who could have bungled the exercise but he didn’t,” he wrote in a text message.
Some pertinent issues have been thrown up in this short response which need to be addressed for the sake of our stuttering democracy and the good of our country. There is no doubting the fact that Afari-Gyan is a great son of Ghana, who has made not only his country, but indeed, the whole of Africa proud. By consistently posting sterling performance in the onerous job of husbanding his country’s democracy, he has written his name in gold. Ghanaians will remain, forever, indebted to him.
However, having said that, I also beg to disagree that he, alone, made all the difference, or even the greater difference, unless there is evidence to prove that there was a deliberate move by the President to influence him in perverting the cause of justice and he resisted the move. If in the face of a possible loss of power by his party and in spite of the well known rivalry between him and his predecessor, Jerry Rawlings, whose party, the National Democratic Congress (NDC) and its presidential candidate, John Atta Mills, were poised to upstage his own preferred candidate and personal friend, Nana Akufo-Addo, Kufuor did not lift a finger for either his party or his friend, then he is the man who made all the difference. This is more so considering that the results were, ab-initio, too close to call. In fact, Akufo-Addo won in the first ballot and was only short of victory by a fraction of a percent.
I may be wrong, but the problem with elections in Africa is not necessarily the inability of Electoral Commissions to conduct free and fair elections but the lack of will on the part of the political leadership to do what is right. Losing elections and gracefully accepting defeat are part of the essential elements of a robust democratic culture. This fact is lost on most African leaders, including Nigeria politicians.
I will give two instances. Both Zimbabwe and Kenya experienced political upheavals last year with properties worth billions of dollars destroyed and precious human lives, running into thousands, lost after their respective Electoral Commissions conducted what both local and international election observers described as free and fair elections, which were won by the opposition political parties. In both countries, the social dislocations occasioned by the violence still linger. Many in Kenya are still living in refugee camps, afraid to go back to their ancestral homes, in their own country.
It is also not quite correct to say that because “President Kufuor came in through a fair and incorrupt system, he more or less had no choice but to hands off like Rawlings did when he won in 2000.” While it may, on the face value, seem logical to assert that a man who came to power through a free and fair election, particularly one who upstaged a ruling party, is morally bound to uphold a free and fair election even if the results go against his political party or personal political interest, politics is not a game of morality. It takes either strong institutions of state that are superior to the political leadership to enforce compliance as it is the case in advanced democracies or the courage of the leader to do that which is right as Kufuor just did in Ghana. That Kufuor decided to follow the footsteps of Nelson Mandela, Thabo Mbeki, etc, who gave up power without a fuse, should not make us ignore the fact that he could have decided to play the Mugabe game and the heavens will not fall.
To argue otherwise is to repudiate even recent history. For instance, Mwai Kibaki, in 2002, rode to power on the wings of a coalition of opposition political parties, the National Rainbow Coalition (NARC). He defeated the candidate of the ruling KANU party, Uhuru Kenyatta, son of the country’s first President, Jomo Kenyatta and protégé of the sitting President, Arap Moi, who had been in power for 24 years. As at then KANU had been in power for 40 uninterrupted years. But on December 27, 2002, Kenyans handed him a resounding victory over Kenyatta, having scored 62 percent of the votes. Moi, a dictator, conceded defeat and on December 30, 2002, still nursing injuries from a car crash and in a wheel chair, Kibaki was sworn in as the country’s third President.
Five years after, rather than concede defeat and bow out of power gracefully, having been floored by Raila Odinga of the Orange Democratic Movement, Kibaki, now 75 years, orchestrated an unprecedented political mayhem in his country that led to the death of thousands of his countrymen. This is a man who had seen it all – entered parliament in 1963, held various ministerial portfolios, including finance, and was Vice President for ten years. Despite all these, his appetite for power never diminished. If Kufuor had decided to play a Kibaki, he could well have done so and today, the international community will be pleading for a government of national unity, as they did in Kenya and Zimbabwe, with the NPP producing the President and the NDC producing either the Vice President or Prime Minister.
On the eve of his departure, Kufuor called for a constitutional amendment that would extend the presidential term by one more year (from the current four years to five). That is the height of selflessness knowing full well that if the lawmakers hearken to his call, the primary beneficiary will be Atta Mills and by extension the opposition party. If the constitution is amended now and the presidential term is increased by one more year, it will take his party at least five years or even ten (if Mills is re-elected) to regain power.
Most Nigerians love hoisting the 1993 presidential election on the totem pole of credibility. Good. But can we actually say that was Humphrey Nwosu’s making? I doubt, unless we want to be economical with the truth. The election was free and fair because for whatever reason, General Ibrahim Babangida wanted it so. Perhaps, the marabous had assured him of a different outcome. And when the reality hit him on the face, did he not annul it? Why didn’t Nwosu defy him at that point? Even when he decided to ‘put the records straight’ 15 years after the annulment, was it not still at the behest of Babangida who wanted to use the records to burnish his sullied political credentials once again?
We miss the point, and fundamentally too, when we claim that the problem of democracy in Nigeria is the inability of our electoral commissions to conduct free and fair elections. The problem lies with the mindset of the average Nigerian politician who believes that elections can only be won and not lost. With or without Professor Maurice Iwu, the outcome of the 2007 polls would have been different if the political class, particularly President Olusegun Obasanjo, wanted it so. It was not the Independent National Electoral Commission that snatched ballot boxes, orchestrated assassinations and all manner of violence. We have a political environment that is very hostile to democracy. And we simply play the ostrich when we ignore this fact.
And the danger in this game of ostrichism is that we are bound to make the same mistakes of 2007 in 2011.
Ikechukwu 