Cameron Duodu
LETTER FROM THE NORTH
I remember an immigration officer at Jan Smuts airport once asking me, “Is Ghana in the Commonwealth?” “Yes,” I said. He waved me through. But a Nigerian, whose country was also in the Commonwealth, was held up for several minutes. When he finally emerged to join me in the arrivals hall, he was miffed. “I thought we were both from countries in the Commonwealth,” he complained. I couldn’t offer him any explanation.
Yes, the Commonwealth has many such mysteries in its bag of tricks. Almost everything about the organisation is subject to all sorts of different interpretations. Hence it is sometimes known irreverently as the Folk of the Fudge.
Take democracy, for instance. Pakistan was kept out of the just-concluded meeting in Durban because it has just installed a mili-tary government. The existence of a military government in Pakistan means that the country is not a democratic country, right? Fair enough.
The only snag is that the government which the military overthrew, although democratically elected, had, by the time it was overthrown, become more authoritarian than many military governments. The elected leader of the opposition, Benazir Bhutto, had been frightened into exile, and her husband jailed. The police and the judiciary, as well as a host of institutions that, under real democracy, should act completely independently of the ruling party, had been hijacked for the exclusive use of Prime Minister Nawar Sharif and his party.
While these gross perversions of democracy were going on, the Commonwealth looked on without saying a word, because it is not used to commenting publicly on the internal affairs of member countries, so long as these countries have democratically elected governments.
Or look at a country like Cameroon. A former French-ruled country, it has one of the most repressive regimes in Africa. Yet it is a full member of the Commonwealth, because its ruler, Paul Biya, is able to rig elections and claim, thereby, to be democratically elected.
The opposition in Cameroon has a more uncomfortable time than in most other former French territories, and this is made worse by the fact that the opposition is centred on the English-speaking part of the country, which Britain, in time-honoured fashion, abandoned to France just before independence in 1960. Its leader, John Fru Ndi, has been incarcerated more times than he cares to remember. Yet this vile regime passes the Commonwealth’s democracy test.
Ghana is also able to pass the democracy test, even though, just a few days ago, the former editor of a weekly publication, Eben Quarcoo of the Free Press, was jailed for 90 days for criminal libel. Yes, criminal libel!
Now, his offence was grave, no doubt about it. He had accused the wife of the president, Nana Konadu Agyemang Rawlings, of drug dealing, among other things. Huge damages would have been awarded against him anywhere in a defamation trial in a civil case.
But instead of instituting a civil suit against him, the Ghana government chose to resurrect the outmoded law of criminal libel, which the British enacted in colonial times to save the colonial oppressors from being criticised by their loyal subjects, and used it against the journalist.
And do you know what? The very evil criminal libel is supposed to try to prevent – inciting the populace against officials – has actually occurred, since the journalist was jailed. The car of Justice Ofoe, the judge who sentenced him to 90 days in jail, has been burnt down by suspected arsonists. As far as I can remember, this is the first case of its kind in Ghana’s judicial history. Talk of an unorthodox reaction to an unorthodox prosecution.
Even the very elections by which countries are supposed to pass the Commonwealth democracy test are rigged with impunity, with the Commonwealth looking on and sometimes giving its blessing. In the election which transformed Flight Lieutenant Jerry Rawlings to a civilian president in 1992, the electoral commissioner was rejected by the opposition because the opposition was not consulted before he was appointed. The government took no notice of the opposition’s objections. So they boycotted the parliamentary elections.
But they then made the mistake – after being criticised severely by some Commonwealth countries for failing to take part in the parliamentary elections – of fielding a candidate for the presidential election. The same “partisan” electoral commissioner was used. And the opposition candidate was soundly defeated. The same electoral commissioner ran the 1996 elections.
And, again, the opposition was defeated.
Yet the fact that the Ghana opposition had meticulously produced documentary evidence to demonstrate that all the elections had been rigged and had resulted in a “stolen verdict”, did not count with the Commonwealth.
Ironically – and this was the unkindest cut of all – the Commonwealth chose the Ghana electoral commissioner to head the Commonwealth observer team to the Nigerian elections that brought in the civilian government of President Olusegun Obasanjo! It was like a slap in the face of the Ghana opposition.
Certainly, there are many positive things that the Commonwealth can and does do. Among these is the strong stand it took against the Abacha government in Nigeria, following the hanging of Ken Saro-Wiwa and the Ogoni Eight. The bilateral relations between member states, which facilitate training programmes and exchanges of personnel between them, are also of great value.
In many ways, then, the Commonwealth is quite unique in the world, and should set greater store by this uniqueness, by defining what is true and good about the political evolution of its membership, and making sure these are rammed down the throats of all those who would want to remain members.
At the moment, the definition of democracy in the eyes of the Commonwealth is a shade too mechanical for comfort.