Someone please ask the President for me:
What kind of false dilemma/dichotomy fallacy is this? The fact that people are for NO to open partisanship in district level elections means they are for NO to district level elections simpliciter? How? Or without political parties no elections can be conducted at the national level? I need education!
And to those calling the NO advocates hypocrites, gyae saa koraa . For it’s rather the insincerity of those who participate in the elections (Candidates and their pushers). Those are the candidates who cannot rid themselves of party colours to campaign on personal integrity and conviction. So they employ subtle partisanship approach, knowing very well that it’s the most effective means for people to overlook efficiency to deliver as an elected official and vote for them. It is incompetent to call my grandmother a hypocrite, when it’s your dishonesty and insincerity to circumvent the regulations which is the problem. Why don’t you do your house to house campaign using your integrity as your trump card? Or we have told people that until they come tell us their political affiliation we won’t vote at all?
I have been a silent ‘No-er’. In fact, if it were possible, national elections mpo should be ‘seemingly’ non-partisan (as absurd, unpragmatic and impossible it may seem). There is a growing discontent with political parties across the divide. The gap between the the ruling elites and the masses keep widening. The President alluded to a certain broad consultations that were conducted, but he forgot that those consulted were these same ruling elites and so called opinion leaders, who no longer have influential opinion on anybody. In fact, their opinions only go as far as their own doorsteps. So in effect, there was restrictive rather than broader consultation. Me mmom was not consulted, but I was admonished to go agree on something that i was not consulted.
I reckon the impossibility of absolute consultation. But it is clearly a weak inductive reasoning to think that you can consult with such a negligible fraction of people, draw inference on that basis and call it broad consultation. Political strategy requires that in a year to an election, any proposition of policy, regulation or law must be tested and retested before it comes to the open. You don’t test it with the elites, you test it with the masses. If there was Consultation, properly so called, then we wouldn’t have gotten to this stage at all. This is what democracy is about o and that is why Plato called it _mob rule . If we have chosen this path, then it must be done well.
Amazingly, the ruling party feels stabbed by the opposition. Basically because they were consensus ad idem on partisan participation. What they are not realising is that others such as US feel stabbed by both of them. That they could go hide in their ‘one corner’, decide on partisanship elections at the district level and tell us to massively support. Why didn’t they involve us in the so called consultation? And when we do not support they tell us that there is no consensus.
What consensus are we talking about koraaa ? Doesn’t the loud opposition to partisan participation constitute a consensus? Or some of us don’t understand consensus?
Admittedly it will not make any political sense for the government to have pressed on with this, because it was really playing into the net of their political opponents. I do not see this as a victory for anyone. If there is any positive thing, it is with respect to the fact that someone has listened and taken a decision to withdraw.
To those saying an opportunity has been missed, I have one question p3 for you: what opportunity exactly? I don’t think you call the instances when political parties will potentially turn this into a vote market an opportunity. Or when only the ‘haves’ are selected by these parties to contest, as the opportunity. If you want to know the future of what you call opportunity today, then look at how MPs are currently elected to contest. Abeg , that opportunity was not to be masses’ opportunity.
If people still say we are deceiving, tickling and push-pinning ourselves into thinking that such elections could ever been non partisan, my response has always been simple: Have we not been deceiving ourselves every four years into thinking that those that we vote for are actually going to serve us and bring us development? Please paaaa . ….last four years I deceived myself into thinking that the road leading to my hometown would be fixed. Let’s end it there koraaa . We are in a country where deception is not new.
If it is broken and needs fixing, it has to be fixed well. I rest my case!
Kow Kwegya
Cape Coast and nowhere.
