Did Raila and Ruto learn any lessons from Akufo-Addo and Mahama on democracy?

Ghana is a hot political subject even today when Africans should be focusing on Yahya Jammeh’s chicanery in the Gambia. Too many newspaper write-ups are praising Ghana for holding democratic elections. One would think Africans can’t vote and conclude an election peacefully. The undercurrent of the adulation for Ghana is that Africans wouldn’t naturally transfer power from a losing incumbent to a winning opponent. But apparently the good people of Ghana have successfully bucked this trend. Ghanaians seem willing to defy the implied ‘African’ disease of holding onto power, in the manner of Yahya Jammeh, who has insisted that he didn’t lose an election, which he had conceded defeat.

So, when John Dramani Mahama saluted Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo and his party, New Patriotic Party, for winning the elections, many pan-Africanists sighed with relief. Ghana was setting a good example, they hailed. For Nana Akufo-Addo had lost twice, in 2008 and 2012, to candidates of the then ruling party, National Democratic Congress. When he lost before, he went to court, lost the case and bid his time for the next round. He seemed to understand that politics is a game; there is a return match, which one could win if they prepare more and there is a good referee on the pitch.

Could the two wise men from Kenya — William Ruto and Raila Odinga who attended Akufo-Addo’s coronation — learn any lessons from the affable people of Ghana? Did they speak to either Mahama or Akufo-Addo about statesmanship? Did they find out what Ghanaians think about nationhood? There are more questions that one would wish to ask the two about their brief sojourn in the land of Kofi Annan. For it took the intervention of Annan to remind Kenyans about the importance of nationhood. Could they have seen for themselves and picked a trick or two about elections?

FRESH START

John Dramani Mahama gives a glimpse into the mind of an African politician who would willingly relinquish power in his memoir, My First Coup D’état: Memories from the Lost Decades of Africa (Bloomsbury, 2012). This book isn’t about Mahama’s time in politics, where he served in various administrations, rising to deputize the late John Atta Mills between 2009 and 2012. It is about his childhood, growing up and becoming a man.

Mahama was a child of privilege. His father, Emannuel Adama Mahama, was a minister in the first government of independent Ghana. But he was also a successful businessman. The young Mahama was studying at Achimota School – one of the privileged schools in West Africa from the colonial times – when the first coup d’état in Ghana happened on February 24, 1966. This event threw his life into turmoil. His father was arrested and incarcerated. He lost his wealth and had to go back to his birthplace, Bole, in the Damongo Region, found in northwest of Ghana to start afresh.

The coup episode is clearly a significant part of the Mahama’s experience, as a Ghanaian and a politician. He was shocked, like many Ghanaians at the time the military overthrew the politicians, and says this about it, “… Ghanaian citizens seemed less inclined toward violence; this is why our first coup d’état was such a shock to everyone”.

The loss of privileges that came with the father’s government job, especially the house the family occupied in Accra, affected him but didn’t upend his life. Instead it taught him a lesson for life. He says, “When I look back on my life, it’s clear to me that this moment marked the awakening of my consciousness. It changed my life and influenced all the moments that followed.”

Mahama pinpoints that moment as the trigger for what he calls ‘Africa’s lost decades.’ Mahama insists that those years and events need to be remembered and discussed if Africa is to overcome its present problems. He writes, “During the ‘lost decades’, Ghana – and in fact all of Africa – experienced ‘brain drain’, a mass exodus that found many of our artists, intellectuals, professionals, and politicians living abroad in either forced or self-imposed exile.

As a result, that period of time and the direct impact it had on the cultural, educational and political lives of those who remained has not been heavily documented, especially not from a personal perspective. They are years that are rarely discussed, years of untold difficulty and hardship, of ever-present hunger and fear. They are years that many have, understandably, tried to forget, to erase entirely from memory.” What African leader doesn’t know that it is misrule that bequeathed the curse of the late 1960s into the 1990s to Africans?

Yet, Mahama also writes about how being bullied when a student at Achimota was a lesson in standing up for one’s rights. The bully, one Ezra, like all oppressors, started small; say he forgot his toothpaste in the bathroom, he would request someone to pick it up for him. Then one day he simply demanded that all afternoon snacks be delivered to him. Of course, Mahama and his classmates delivered their food to him.

This episode is important because Mahama suggests that although they were all suffering under Ezra’s rule, their solidarity was only expressed in silence. Until one day he, Mahama, defied the big, taller, older and stronger bully. He was beaten for his ‘insolence but he had eaten his snack. After some time, he was ‘exempted’ from handing over their food.

LOVE OF COUNTRY, FAMILY

The third element that gives a clue to Mahama’s character is how he speaks about his family – and eventually about his community and country. Clearly he was ‘daddy’s son.’ His father saw him as a special child, which is why he sent him to a boarding school at an early age. But his father also lived away from his mother, who had stayed on upcountry whilst Mahama and his siblings lived in the city. Thus, Mahama grew up knowing the ways of the city and the countryside. Mahama speaks very endearingly about his father, mother, siblings – including step-brothers and sisters. His story emphasizes the idea of the family as the basic unit of any society.

Therefore, Mahama seems to suggest, if Africa wishes to progress, it has to learn to erase, at least culturally, the boundaries that colonialism established between peoples who share languages, cultures or beliefs; even within a country. This is why he speaks of West Africa as if it is one big, extended family. His own family could easily find refuge in Ivory Coast or Nigeria.

This is how his father settled in exile, in Nigeria after passing through Ivory Coast, during the regime of Jerry Rawlings in the 1980s, when he was deemed an opponent of the military government. Although the old man had to leave Nigeria, like many other Ghanaians who had migrated there because of xenophobia, Mahama suggest that such episodes are consequences of Africans’ inability to promote solidarity among themselves.

In other words, Africans need to confront and defy divisive forces pretty much the way he did when he contested Ezra’s bullying. Remember there wasn’t a more strident Pan-Africanist than Kwame Nkrumah. Remember that we have had even a Ghanaian as Chief Justice in this country: Frederick Kwasi Apaloo.

My First Coup D’état is as personal a story as it is a tale of growing up and falling in love with one’s community and country. Mahama’s story leaves the reader with the feeling that his respect and love for his country draws from his love for his family and community. Maybe, just maybe, this is why politicians like Mahama would find it easier accept the verdict of the people, who had adjudged his party and government to have failed to deliver on its promises and to concede power to an opponent.