Comment
Good Men And Evil Systems
For some time, Flight-Lieutenant Jerry Rawlings of Ghana, his apologists and other coup makers in West Africa tell the world that they had to overthrow the is that he is either repudiating his former positions or he elected governments because those who ran them were evil men.
Fit-Lt. Rawlings has put it rather more succinctly in an interview that was broadcast on the African Service of the BBC: "Those criminals whom we overthrew. "The problem, the Flight-Lieutenant would have everybody believe was with the type of people who had been in charge, they were corrupt, they were evil and they were criminals and they were inept. He was therefore offering himself and his chosen friends and colleagues as the group with a right to rule over Ghana.
They were morally upright and had integrity, they were good men and moreover, they were capable people. Right from the start, therefore, the regime of the Provisional National Defence Council had placed itself on a morally superior plane and asked to be judged as such. Personali- ties, Fit-Lt. Rawlings was saying, mattered very much. The struggle he said, was between good and evil men and he had no doubts at all about where the good people were. He and those who supported him were good and those, anybody who opposed him, were evil. He went even further than that, for the PNDC Law 42 gave him the absolute power to decide between good and evil, truth and falsehood, life and death, freedom and incarceration in Ghana.
It is of paramount importance and relevance that those who constitute the ruling group in Ghana be examined in their personal lives. That after all, is the basis of their own claim to power. Thus far the PNDC and the highest officials that have ruled have included a bewildering array of the most unsavoury characters in Ghanaian society.
There have been in the PNDC and its various organs, murderers - Amartey Kwei, Kojo Lee among others, thieves and terrorists and, when it comes to ineptness, is significant that the PNDC is yet to point to one success in almost four years of ruling the country.
Having chosen many people who had not had any experience in government before the PNDC and were therefore supposedly untarnished and morally upright who had then turned out to be such disasters, Fit-Lt. Rawlings has turned to picking people he himself had condemned.
There is the curious case of the Central Regional Secretary, Col. Baidoo who was a prominent member of the Acheampong regime, there is Lt-Col. Thompson, newly appointed Secretary for Greater Accra who under the Rawlings Armed Forces Revolutionary Council (AFRC) was beaten up, locked up, tried and divested of some of his properties. Then there is Mr K.A. Appiah who as Acheampong's Finance Minister was supposed to have been so inept, corrupt and such a total disaster that he was to be banned from public office for ten years. He, along with others has also been resurrected by Fit-Lt. Rawlings with no explanation to anybody.
It is not clear whether Fit-Lt. Rawlings has so run out of his stock of clean and good men that he has had to draw from a pool of people he himself had been loudest in condemning. And since he does not feel the need to give any explanations to the country, the clear implication has given up any pretence of presiding over good people.
And yet Fit-Lt. Rawlings had sought to justify his seizure of power because of the supposedly evil and criminal actions of the type of people he is now appointing into positions of power today.
Now that it has become clear that the crop of people currently ruling Ghana are no more morally superior than others, there is a determined effort being made to downplay the various scandals that have characterised the regime.
Suddenly it is being suggested that the fact that one or two chairman of Public Tribunals have been shown to be corrupt or the chairman of the Citizens Vetting Committee has been shown to be corrupt, would not be reason enough to condemn the PNDC. Before the coming into power of the PNDC, rumours of corruption constituted enough reason for the government to be overthrown and for an entire system to be condemned. Obviously if the freedom that existed under the constitutional governments and enabled every action to be scrutinised and analysed were available today there would be more exposures of wrong doings in high places rather than the current practice whereby only those who have lost favour with Fit-Lt. Rawlings get exposed.
But the absurdities go farther. Prof. Kofi Awoonor the Ambassador to Brazil and member of the National Com- mission on Democracy has been quoted in a recent interview that "even if angels were brought to run the governments under the constitutions of 1969 and 1979, they would still have failed, because there were structural defects.
In other words, the problem was not that the people who had been overthrown were necessarily evil or it criminals as we had been led to believe, the fault lay with "the system", they might very well have been good people and it wouldn't have made the slightest difference to the fate of their governments.
It might be worth considering that there is nothing foreign in the concept of ruling by consent - the very basis of our traditional society rests on that very concept. The only aberration came during colonial rule, and that is why the nationalists fought them. In one way there is a perverse truth in the observation that Ghana is not free yet, because the country is once again being ruled without the consent of the people, and freedom will be regained only when the people themselves choose their leaders.
Whoever the people choose will in the circumstances be the "good men", it is the free choice that endows the goodness on the rulers. For we will commend Abraham Lincoln to Flt-Lt. Rawlings and his friends that there exists no one so good as to rule anybody without the consent of the other.
