When the Sub-Saharan Africa cyclone came to town!

One of Africa’s celebrated diplomats and a first-rank actor on the international scene, Dr Mohamed Ibn Chambas, has added his voice to the charged political atmosphere in the country in the run-up to one of the historically consequential democratic acceptability tests in December.

The clarion call to the President and other critical stakeholders within the country’s democratic value chain, by him, was for them to put the interest of the country first, by ensuring a free, fair and peaceful general election in December.

“It should not be under your watch that Ghana will experience violence and mayhem during this year’s general election. The year 2020 was, to some extent, a blot on our enviable record in delivering non-violent, peaceful elections.

Let it not be repeated; let us draw a line there,” the African Union High Representative for Silencing the Guns, said.

The clarion call couldn’t have come at a better time than now when the African political space evokes the configuration of state-society relationships based on kinship ties in which holding political office is the safest and easiest means to the accumulation of wealth and distribution of patronage based on ethnic ties.

Yet still, the contextual interpretation of Ghanaian politics has always downplayed the ability of unhealthy politicking to spark ethnic violence.

Ghana’s steady decline in the Global Peace Index from 40th in 2022, 51st in 2023 to 55th position in 2024, with 2.3 million small arms in circulation where 1.2 million are duly registered and 1.1 million in illegal hands, according to the National Commission of Small Arms and Light Weapons (NCSALW), paints a gloomy security picture and calls to questioning our self-congratulatory posturing as an oasis of peace in Africa.

Space

A cursory look at the current Ghanaian political space evokes a worrying signal of a powder keg emanating from the needless toxic political rhetoric laced with ethnic undertones by politicians on campaign platforms and the controversy over the alleged electoral irregularities in Ghana’s electoral register in upcoming December elections; which appears to be putting the country on the edge.

A country with some sections seen as conflict-infested hell-holes bedevilled with a series of chieftaincy, dynastic and inter-ethnic conflicts in volatile areas in the North and some parts of the South.

All these issues added to other combustible factors such as the existential threat of galamsey, youth unemployment; youth bulge, etc., put a huge strain on the already stressed security architecture of the country, a situation that requires the political class to turn a new leaf on the confrontational and bellicose nature of politicking. It wasn’t, therefore, surprising.

Evidence abounds on how some leading politicians from the two dominant political parties are leveraging their ethnic constituencies and also building anthropologically fragile ethnic coalitions on the need to mobilise for competition on resources and appointments along ethnic lines in their bid to win power, in an electoral process that appears to be a savage blood sport that doesn’t create allowance for magnanimity in victory and gallantry in defeat, which by every measure could be a casus belli for distributional conflicts.

This warrants a lot of attention, especially where a political landscape like ours is a zero-sum competition with the winner, taking all, and the loser, losing all.

Diverse

The Ghanaian society is quintessentially an ethnically diverse one, where every Ghanaian is highly sensitive to issues of ethnic significance, with even the most cosmopolitan Ghanaian exhibiting ethnic consciousness on issues related to politics and social developments.

Some scholars have argued that the 16 regions of the country, which we see as merely administrative, are in essence; manifestly administrative but latently ethnic a reason why we must put in measures to overcome the seeming fault lines that got other ethnically plural societies into its dark history.

Regrettably, the emergence of the infamous “Agyapadie” document in an already polarised environment is a clear sign of ominous dark clouds gathering over the democratic space of the country, which could lead to an ethnically driven resource distributional conflict.

The “Agyapadie” document, which authenticity is still a bone of contention, is an alleged grand scheme to capture the state, ostensibly as a silver bullet to pacify the ‘’gods’’ of one ethnic group for its unsung heroic role in the development of Ghana.

Even though the alleged accused behind the document has since denied knowledge of authorship of same, it brings to the fore the dangers of ethnic competition and underscores the significance of building Ghana on ideas and not ethnic or clan identities.

A parallel can be drawn to Project 2025, the authoritarian playbook compiled by the right-wing Heritage Foundation as a presidential blueprint for a future Trump presidency that also attracted loads of condemnation across the globe.

We must resist the temptation of non-performing politicians and public officers struggling with equilibrium to dredge up any bizarre unhealthy ethnic rhetoric; as the fear of getting their comeuppance in this year’s acceptability test hangs over their heads like the sword of Damocles.

We should also contend with harmonising our interests as Ghanaians by picking apart divisive, violent and rambling word salad of politicians as we inch into the December elections.

Democratic

Ghana arguably has ticked most of the boxes of democratic reversal, but by dint of sheer luck we are still unscratched in the fourth republican dispensation relative to other African nations who have suffered grievous democratic backsliding; the more reason we need to up our game because “lady luck” is not a prostitute who will always be available on demand.

The threats of violence and physical altercations must stop. Furthermore, we must contend with the ease with which mass-killing machines can convert hate speech into violence with just the press of a trigger, and be mindful of the fact that the only difference between Ghana and the likes of Rwanda, Kenya and others who have suffered ethnic conflicts and democratic reversals is that, they added loaded guns to their challenges.

Need I remind all the critical stakeholders of the December elections that, where wisdom reigns; there shouldn’t be a conflict between thinking and feeling?

The writer is a Doctoral Scholar in Peace and Conflict Studies,
University for Business and Integrated Studies (UBIDS), Wa.
E-mail: babaiddi1906@hotmail.com