The political parties – the National Democratic Congress (NDC), the New Patriotic Party (NPP), the People’s National Convention (PNC) and the Convention People’s Party (CPP), which constitute the Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA)/GPPP, met last weekend in Koforidua to deliberate on the issue of the polarisation of Ghanaian politics.
After a free, frank and exhaustive discussions, the participants in joint communiqué agreed that the country was politically polarised at the national level among political parties, within political parties and between institutions of state and among political personalities and attributed the causes of the state of affairs at the national level to include ethnicity, chieftaincy, political violence and political detentions of the past.
It added that the consequences of the constitutional pathologies of the past, ideology, the generational, gender, north-south and rural-urban divide, as well as the economic divide contributed to the polarisation.
Among the causes of the inter-party polarisation, according to the communiqué were ethnicity, the ‘revolutions’ of the past and their victims, the problems of the 2001 and 2009 transitions, the perception of ‘selective justice’, perceived abuse of the judicial process and partisan employment practices of political parties when in power.
It said intra-party polarisation arose from ethnicity, ideology, the role of promoters of political parties in their parties, issues of financial accountability of political party office holders, cliquism within political parties, the centralised nature of the political parties, the foot soldier phenomenon and political opportunism within the parties.
It explained that inter-personal polarisation took the form of differences among important political personalities of state.
On a critique of the paper on political polarisation, participants were of the view that the report on polarisation should be improved by defining the concept of polarisation, identifying a profile against which acts and omissions of politicians and political parties may be measured, including other polarisation issues such as the implementation of the Single Spine Salary Structure and the brutal law enforcement methods of the security agencies.
On polarisation and the media: The Role of the National Media Commission (NMC) and the Ghana Journalists Association, it explained that the media to a large extent exacerbated the polarisation in the country through avoidable excesses and sometimes deliberate untruths and that the poor conditions of service of journalists, the profit motives of media owners, the ownership of media houses by politicians and the desire of political parties to win elections at all costs contributed to the media’s fuelling of the polarisation crisis.
It said that the NMC was so under-resourced that it found it difficult to perform its constitutional role satisfactorily.
It stressed the need to give the NMC some teeth to be able to deal with errant journalists and that whilst the Ghana Journalists Association as a voluntary association of journalists lacked the legislative backing to discipline its wayward members, its Code of Ethics was being largely unenforceable.
The communiqué conceded that the absence of effective national institutions to contribute to the system of checks and balances in the governance arrangements of the country was partly responsible for the polarisation.
Notwithstanding the findings of polarisation, the workshop nevertheless agreed that the country was not doing too badly in the effort to depolarise its politics and noted in this regard the gravitation of all parties toward a centrist ideology on the basis of the country’s Directive Principles of State Policy and the move towards the establishment of a multi-partisan National Development Planning Commission to make it possible for all political parties to buy in the medium and long-term development plans.
Speakers at the workshop, a Senior lecturer of the Ghana Institute of Management and Public Administration (GIMPA), Professor Kwamena Ahwoi, Mr Kabral Blay-Amihere, Chairman of the NMC, Professor Kenneth Attafuah, Private Legal Practitioner and Mr Ransford Tetteh, President of the Ghana Journalist Association, delivered papers on polarisation of Ghana’s Politics, polarisation and the Media: The Role of the National Media Commission, polarisation on Ghana’s Politics and Polarisation and the Media: The Role of the Ghana Journalists Association respectively.
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