The 2024 general election is barely four months away. It is therefore safe to say that we are at the threshold of yet another political season. Unlike those gone by, this season seems to lack the usual vigour, excitement and claim upon the attention of citizens, save the die-in-the-wool political hacks, who have the duty of raising the din to announce the dawn of the season. It looks and feels like political anomie has taken hold of us.
Why are we in such a state? Could it be that the political parties and actors have, collectively, failed to put before Ghanaians messages and programmes of an impelling purpose and have thus failed to summon the imagination and energies of Ghanaians to gird up our loins to tackle the urgent task of national development that lies ahead of us? To my mind, the structure and functioning of our political parties need a second and serious look.
It is said that “no organization in the Church, business or government can survive unless from time-to-time it re-examines its purpose for being and returns to that original agenda; otherwise, it gets deflected into all sorts of side issues.” (John Gardner- Self Renewal)
Kenneth Janda also teaches us that the organizing principles of political parties put parties into form main organizational manifestations or forms; – Party, Team, Tribe and Cult.
At the core is the classic political party. Edmund Burke, Harold Laski, Karl Deutsche and many others have defined or described a political party as the coming together of like minds, to seek political power for the development of a nation. It is an organization that attracts adherents and activists to its political principles.
Edmund Burke held that parties joined politicians “united for promoting their joint endeavours the national interest upon some particular principles in which they are all agreed.”
Political parties are therefore distinguished by the ideas, values, goals and particular principles they hold or aspire to, and that draws like minds together. They also seek to place their avowed representatives in government positions as agents to promote their common goals. The term “avowed representatives” means that they must be openly identified with the party name and/or label. Placing their avowed representatives in government positions must broadly be interpreted as through the electoral process, which is the only legitimate means by which power must be sought and won. It is this form or manifestation to which the term “political party” must be reserved.
The next manifestation or form of political organization is what Anthony Downs described as Teams “seeking to control the governing apparatus by gaining office in a duly constituted election.” His principal argument was that whenever a political party, properly so-called, reduced its whole objective and focus to just winning elections, it would have become an electoral team or machine that would change its position on any subject simply for the sake of winning elections. Their reason for being gets reduced to winning an election. Nothing else matters not even the values, beliefs, principles and morals upon which the party was founded.
Once power has been won on such an opportunistic basis, the contradictions begin to emerge. The party appears not to be what voters thought it was; the programmes and promises cannot be sustained and become dysfunctional; double talk abounds and people who were seen as honest no longer appear so. We then descend into an era of insincerity and double-talk.
In his book, “It Was All a Big Lie; How the Republican Party Became Donald Trump,” Stuart Stevens wrote, “A political party without a higher purpose is nothing more than a cartel, a syndicate. There is no organized, coherent purpose other than the acquisition and maintenance of power.”
Lillian Manson also describes a situation where partisan behaviour is driven or motivated by social and special groups linked to a party. The party at this stage becomes a political “Tribe.” It comprises the hardcore party identifiers who often align more closely with the “Team” than with the party in general. They become a cabal, a clique or a group within a larger group for whom the party’s wins or losses are internalized and personalized.
The people who banded together into a cabal to capture and use the larger political party for their narrow ends begin a practice of intense internal identity politics, which only seeks to exclude all who are not “them” from whatever gains power may bring. It may mean marginalizing or purging from the ranks of the party, all those who are seen not to be “in” with the cabal. The adopted language is that he or she is not one of us and must therefore be expended.
The final phase of manifestation is when all political activities and focus are centred around the personality of one person then, the party would have degenerated into a cult. The German sociologist Max Weber used the term “cult” to describe leaders with “expansive personalities who establish ascendancy over other human beings by their overbearing forcefulness.”
The followers, out of a supine and impotent response to power, grant them wholesale authority to act for them on political matters and give the cult leader the right to rule the party as if he owned it.
It is through such a prison that we as Ghanaians must take a serious look at the state of democratic politics to stem the slide of our body politic into political anomie, return us to our original agenda, and not be deflected by the many ongoing theatrics.
Of the four manifestations of political organization or mobilization, the one which seems to have faded the most is the classic political party. In its bastardization, the attributes of like-mindedness, values, ethos, principles, mores, and attraction of adherents and activists to political principles have all suffered a serious erosion.
Burke’s idea of parties joining politicians “united for promoting their joint endeavours, the national interest upon some particular principles in which they are all agreed,” seems to be lost. Instead of national interest, there is the aggressive and unabashed pursuit of narrow self or sectional interest even to the detriment of the national good. Instead of choosing between staying true to its principles, values and mores, parties and political actors choose winning votes. Instead of party cohesion and collective interest, we have degenerated into “Teams” and “Tribes” within parties, whose only objective is the monopolization of the benefits of political power.
Since independence, the excessive monopolization of power by one person (one-man show as General Kutu Acheampong used to call it) has been the bane of our political lives.
“Our political parties and social entities are fragile in their strength and delicate in their toughness. The loyalty that makes them function well also makes them vulnerable to disruption. They are based on trust and covenant, bound together by gossamer, not cowhide. Attacked, tampered with, stretched beyond their bearing, these ties may snap and let the organization fall apart.”
Our politics is no longer altogether a quiet and dignified affair of attending to the serious and urgent business of national development. It is now politics of the noisy and hectic marketplace, and election platforms where noise has more value than ideas and thought.
Like a failing engine, we all can hear the sputtering. It must be clear to many that our democracy is under some distress. The shrill and sometimes unproductive debates and ugly noises are symptoms of this distress. This must be a warning to us all that we cannot afford to sit on our hands and watch this decline, however slow or imperceptible some may want to brand it.
The urgency of now arises from the fact that any political party that is not bedrock upon the solid foundation of national development quickly degenerates into a criminal enterprise. We in Ghana cannot dare look or take a simple step in that direction. We must first reexamine the constitutional framework within which we practice our democracy. We must also reexamine our political parties with the view to making them fit for purpose.
If done in tandem, we stand a better chance of creating an environment as well as the right vehicles to function efficiently in that new environment. No one person or group of people will have all the answers. It will not be an easy task of a national exercise, but it is a task worth undertaking.