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The collapse of the ‘Peoples Party’
vote in the Ghanaian elections
Do they really represent
the people? – by Ade Sawyerr
Nearly 72 hours after the close in the polls at the Ghanaian
general elections on 7th December 2012, the Electoral
Commissioner has called the results in what was billed as a
hotly contested election. The speed with which the results
have been declared must be the envy of other countries in
Africa and the turnout rate of nearly 80% would be
appreciated by most matured democracies as a sign of our
deepening civic responsibility.
Almost 11 million people voted in 26,002 polling stations
across the 275 constituencies in the 10 regions of Ghana.
The winning candidate got about 5.57 million votes, the
losing candidate got about 5.24 million votes and the third
candidate got, not 1 million votes, not half a million
votes, not 100,000 votes but merely 64,362 votes or roughly
translated, 234 votes per constituency or 2 votes per
polling station!
The losing candidate of the opposition New Patriotic Party –
NPP, Nana Addo Dankwa Akuffo-Addo is yet to concede defeat
and though his party may yet challenge the results at the
Supreme Court I doubt very much whether this will make a
difference to the results. The fact of the matter for most
people in Ghana is that, with or without the malfunctioning
of sophisticated election machines, the election results
must not be decided by the courts; elections are political
activities and must be decided only by the people. No one
will condone stealing of elections by incumbent governments
but the opposition party does not have the moral authority
to have the wishes of the people of Ghana set aside by
judges. NPP should learn that conceding defeat is as much a
characteristic of an election as their aborted victory
celebration.
I am yet to take a more detailed look at results and to
carry out my own analysis of the trends and patterns of
voting but this was another election that I called wrong. I
predicted a second round, but I was wrong. President John
Mahama of the ruling National Democratic Congress – NDC who
had taken over as president after the death of President
John Evans Atta Mills in July this year is now the
president-elect to start his first full term in office. He
has won what Ghanaians call a ‘one touch’ election, winning
with more than 50% of the national votes and thus dispensing
with the need for a run-off that would have taken place on
28th December ahead of the swearing in on 7 January 2013.
I am sure that the detailed results will show that the
winning candidate won in 8 of the ten regions of Ghana, an
indication that his party has a much broader national appeal
than the opposition party and that ethnic voting patterns
and false tribal mathematics may have accounted for the
defeat of the opposition party yet again.
http://ghanaelections.peacefmonline.com/pages/maps/president/
The major casualty of these elections is the total collapse
of the vote of the “third parties” or the “Peoples Parties”.
I refer to them as such because they all have Peoples in
their names: the Peoples National Convention – PNC, the
Grand Consolidated Peoples Party – GPCC, the Convention
Peoples Party – CPP and the Progressive Peoples Party – PPP.
These four centre of left parties all claim to have
Nkrumaist leanings and also claim to represent the people of
Ghana and yet together with another party and an independent
candidate could only account for 1.56% of the votes, not
enough to trigger a much predicted second round of voting
and in Britain, they would certainly have ‘lost their
election deposit’ for wasting the time of the electoral
commission in counting non existent votes.. If I was wrong
in calling the election, they must have been very very wrong
in the estimation of their appeal to the people of Ghana!
In the 1992 flawed presidential elections, 3 ‘Peoples Party’
candidates, Limann, Erskine and Darko gained 11.02% of the
votes. In 1996, Edward Mahama of the PNC, the only ‘Peoples
Party’ candidate won 3% of the vote. The 2000 elections went
to a run-off; the number of ‘Peoples Party’ candidates
increased as did their share of the votes, 5 candidates
shared 5.8% of the votes and in 2004 the 2 ‘Peoples Party’
candidates shared 2.9% of the votes. In 2008, the ‘Peoples
Party’ votes of 3.05% forced a second round of votes; there
were 6 ‘Peoples Party’ candidates and Dr Papa Kwesi Nduom,
then of the CPP, emerged as their leading candidate with
1.34% of the total votes in the first round. In 2012, the
‘Peoples Party’ proportion of the votes collapsed to 1.56%
shared amongst 6 candidates and again he led the pack of
‘also runs’ with just about 0.59% of the national vote.
The absence of a credible third party is a worrying thing
for most democracies since there is a polarisation of the
people and a divergence of identity that is not too good for
an evolving democracy. Our craving for a functioning
democracy in turfing out the military regime was for a true
multiparty country and not just a two-party democracy. We
need to define some space for a third party in Ghana and I
am not saying this because my own party the CPP came in a
distant 6th in the election.
I applauded the campaign of Dr Papa Kwesi Nduom in 2008 when
he led the CPP as the flagbearer, I admired his energy
though the hard work was not translated into votes at the
ballot box. I did not think he should have left the CPP last
year and therefore did not follow him into the PPP but I
still believe that he has a vision of an alternative to the
development of Ghana and Africa that is the most refreshing.
After emerging to breathe new life into the CPP, he decamped
to form his own party when he knew that he should have
stayed to continue with the fight to resurrect the party.
Was his leaving really worth the 0.59% of the total vote he
gained at this election?
Dr Papa Kwesi Nduom deserves to be blamed for the collapse
of the ‘‘Peoples Party’ and their disastrous performance.
This is not about what he has done wrong; it is about what
he has failed to do right. If he is to leave a legacy as a
successful politician who made a real impact on the politics
in Ghana, rather than as a failed politician, then he must
start working with others now to create that third space for
a true centre party that we need for the accelerated growth
and development of our country. That would be a worthier
task than his ambition of becoming president of Ghana to
implement his plan to rid our country of poverty and misery.
I have not said it would be easy, it is going to be
difficulty but I suspect that he, more that most in the
country, would have the stature to work on the project of
building this ‘Peoples Movement or Front’
He is aware of the need for a third party that would free
our country from neo-colonialism and the orthodoxy of the
multilateral agencies that only serve to stabilise our
economies but that does not provide us with adequate space
for growth and development within a globalised economy.
Nduom should start thinking about the issues that would help
rally both right and left thinking people in Ghana behind
his vision for the social, economic and political
transformation of our country and Africa.
The only way of doing this is to call for unity between all
the ‘Peoples Party’ members that should lead directly to a
merger. A merger of these parties will not immediately
translate into victory at the next elections but will set
the agenda for the discussions that would transform our
politics away from the traditional identity politics to
issue based politics. The reconstruction process will
involve the integration of the vision into the structures of
the new ‘Peoples Party’ and will follow the reconciliation
stage of healing amongst the different parties. They need to
say sorry to each other for past antagonism and to be real
about the politics of our country, that they have failed our
people by allowing the fractious and fragmented nature of
relationships to result in the collapse of their vote and
make their parties irrelevant to the people of Ghana who
they claim to represent. These leadership of these broken
parties also need to apologise to the people of Ghana before
they can hope for proper reconstruction of their fortunes.
But this merger in itself may not be enough and my thinking
that it could be a start may be because I am still wedded to
the politics of the old days, but the merger may just be the
platform on which a third party may be built. The 1.56% may
be too low a base on which to build, the approach may be
less radical than the root and branch surgery needed but
perhaps this more gradualist approach will give a third
party a better chance and a hope for survival.
The revival will only come when the ‘Peoples Party’ have
been able to articulate how they will be different to the
two dominant parties and how they will work for Ghana and
Africa. I trust that Nduom knows how a third party can hold
a ruling party to account and influence their policies; he
did this when representing the CPP he was able to operate in
an NPP government and emerge as one of their best performing
ministers.
Some would say that I am being unduly harsh on Nduom and he
might just want to do something else, but he is the only one
I see on the horizon now with the passion for a third party.
Perhaps the facts may just have changed for him and there
may be a need for a fresh face to champion this cause for a
third party. I hope for the sake of our country that there
are like-minded people who may just yet save our country
from the stranglehold of the two dominant parties who are
two sides of the same coin.
There are lessons to be learnt for the other parties as
well.
The winning NDC must recognise that though they may seem to
have become a national party and have finally succeeded in
making their founder Jerry John Rawlings irrelevant in their
affairs, the closeness of the result and the fact that the
rejected ballot papers are roughly equivalent to their
margin of victory suggests that there is still a lot for
them to do to become the majority party in Ghana.
The losing NPP has a lot more hard work to do. Elections are
about people and they must ensure that they appeal to all
Ghanaians and not just a small section of Twi speaking
voters. Nana Akuffo-Addo would certainly have made an
excellent president for Ghana; his outlook is more
cosmopolitan and he is not wedded to ideology of any sort
but in this election he became hostage to his party and made
a lot of silly impolitic statements that turned off a large
number of voters who detest and do not trust the NDC. His
erroneous gaffe before the elections that he had been
endorsed by Nana Konadu Agyeman Rawlings was the most
bizarre. His inability to make, the record of the NDC in
this past four years, an issue in this election was a
mistake and having stolen the ‘free education’ promise from
the CPP, he did not do enough to justify it to the people of
Ghana.
I ‘feel for him’ more than for his party. He probably knows
that his party, the NPP, needs to be seriously
decontaminated before it can have any chance of winning
another election in Ghana. I was grateful that they mounted
a credible challenge against Rawlings in 1992 at a time when
the CPP splintered and some members even joined forces with
the NDC, but I am disappointed that they have not been able
to shake themselves of their ethnic origins. Their ethnic
base has contracted into an Akan rump of the NLM and the
Ghana Congress Party. Their Gashifimo Kpee phalange has
disappeared as has the Northern Peoples Party, the Anlo
Youth Movement, the Ewe Unification Alliance and the Muslim
Association Party aspects of the original United Party.
Their party has sadly become an Akan Party that communicates
to people in the Twi language even at major rallies; it did
that at Mantse Agbonaa in the heartlands of the old Tokyo
Joe boys, however the party is not doing too well to
persuade the Akan in the Western, Central and Brong Ahafo
region to embrace them. I trust that they would someday come
to accept what some of us have been telling them for so many
years – Ghana is not Akanland as JB Danquah first proposed
it to be.
They need to be reminded that elections are fought at the
ballot box and not in the courts, they continue to do
themselves damage by continuing to call a verdict by the
people of Ghana a stolen verdict.
To Nduom, Lartey, Ayariga and Sakara, an election is not
like the Olympic Games where taking part is more important
than winning. The main purpose of taking part in an election
is to win and you have failed not only your loyal party
members but have failed the people of Ghana and Africa for
your poor performance. There is work to be done to create a
third party in Ghana and I just hope that they are all up to
the task.
Ade Sawyerr is a partner in the diversity focused management
consultancy Equinox Consulting that works on issues relating
to economic development of disadvantaged communities and
social cultural and political issues of African heritage
people in the Diaspora.
Follow him at @adesawyerr or athttp://adesawyerr.wordpress.com
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