THE 31ST DECEMBER WOMEN’S MOVEMENT MUST REMODEL ITSELF – AND SHED ITS POLITICAL AMBITIONS!

For years Ghanaian women have held their families together through sheer perseverance, love, dedication, and made great sacrifices to ensure the education of their children. Any organisation dedicated to ensuring the empowerment of women in our nation therefore deserves support from society.

It is this recognition of the important role women play in our society that makes many fair-minded Ghanaians reluctant to publicly criticise women’s organisations such as the 31st December Women’s Movement (DWM). Without a shadow of doubt, it has helped many marginalized Ghanaian women, to improve their lives – and the sincerity of its leaders to the cause of women’s empowerment cannot be gainsaid.

However, it is important that its leaders take a fresh look at the way they have run the organisation in the past. A non-governmental organisation engaged in charitable work, by definition, ought to be one that is part of civil society, and is completely separate from the government of the day. Ideally, it ought not to involve itself actively in partisan politics – as it should exist to serve all sections of society irrespective of their political affiliation.

In a multi-party democracy such ours, the women’s wings of political parties, cannot, and must not be allowed, to masquerade as non-governmental organisations – and it cannot be right that they are given the legal status of one. That clearly is an abuse of the law, and, it can be argued further, fraudulent.

We must be honest and bold enough, to admit that there are many independent-minded and fair-minded Ghanaians, in whose view; the DWM is anything other than an opaque affiliate, of the National Democratic Congress (NDC). Some of the DMW’s critics have long accused its leaders of riding on the backs of district assemblies and ruthlessly exploiting the machinery of government to grow their organisation, during the tenure of the last NDC administration.

There is a germ of truth in those criticisms. For, I clearly remember that in the late 1990’s, I spotted a plaque on a door of one of the offices of the Ga District Assembly at Amassaman, which read: “31st December Women’s Movement.” I also remember being told to contact the district assembly in my area, when I once made a telephone enquiry (to its Accra HQ offices) about the feasibility of women in Akim Abuakwa Juaso benefiting from one of the 31st December Women’s Movement’s many women’s empowerment projects.

If the 31st December Women’s Movement is to continue to exist, and not be a source of embarrassment to the present NDC regime of President Mills, it is important that it sheds its political ambitions. It is also important that its leaders do not seek to use it as a vehicle to further their own personal political ambitions. They must not adopt the same negative past strategy of exploiting the machinery of state to grow their organisation.

The DWM must also give real ownership of its projects to the women of the communities they work in – and not legally own those projects itself as if they were franchise-type investments they have made countrywide: in order to make a return on those investments and turn itself into a super-wealthy organisation. That cannot, and will never, be morally right.

No reputable charitable organisation can simply exist in order to enrich itself as an entity, and seek wealth as an end, in itself: through the clever strategy of building up an investment portfolio solely for that purpose and by enrolling millions of (card-bearing and dues-paying?) members. A non-governmental organisation must exist for the sole benefit of its target group: which in the case of the DWM, one presumes, are all marginalized Ghanaian women, in particular – and vulnerable women from other strata of society, generally, one hopes.

Perhaps the DWM ought to take a good look at the “business-models” and organizational ethos underpinning reputable international NGO’s such as: Oxfam; Medicines Sans Frontieres; Fearless Planet; etc. etc. – all of which give ownership of the projects they seek funding for, to the target communities they work with. Surely, that is a far better way to proceed than to continue with the bad old “Alice-in-Wonderland-smoke-and mirrors” ways that led the DMW into so much trouble when there was regime-change in January 2001? A word to the wise…