Ghanaians Will Never Allow Their Nation To Become A Police State

Those "big-men" in Ghana, who want the principle to be established that ordinary people's access to online social media platforms, can be blocked at their whim, simply don't get it: Ghanaians will never allow their nation to become a police state. Ever.

Our commitment to the democratic system of government - with all its faults - is never-ending and unshakeable.

That is why the Inspector General of Police (IGP), Mr. John Kudalor, and the heads of all the other security agencies,  need to clearly understand that it is important that at all material times, they  personally remain committed, to ensuring that Ghana remains a liberal and democratic society - whose leaders serve their people: not lord it over the citizenry.

The IGP, a true professional, and a good and decent gentleman, must reject any advice to block access to online social media platforms on polling day.

That will be a retrogressive step. We must not follow the bad examples set by African leaders with despotic tendencies like Uganda's President Yoweri Museveni, and the leader of the Republic of Congo, President Denis Sassou Nguesso.

Whatever else he might be, President Mahama, is not a leader with despotic tendencies - which is why he must make it absolutely clear to the IGP,  and all the other heads of the security agencies in Ghana, that though he suffers personal abuse, and is slandered daily on online social media platforms, he will not allow access to them to be blocked during his tenure as President: and be lumbered with that as a dubious legacy of sorts.

Ours is a free society - in every sense of the word. We must therefore not allow anyone in our country to let the genie of repression out of the bottle - lest it destroys Ghanaian democracy, yet again. Any policy by the security agencies to block access to online social media platforms, provides a building-block enabling criticism-averse "big-men" to successfully create tomorrow's tyranny.

If access to social media is blocked on polling day, what is there to prevent that happening again, on yet some other occassion? And who is to say that it will not  become a means for crooked politicians to use to stop news of  major scandals exposing high-level corruption in Ghana, from spreading?

Ghana's Constitution guarantees Ghanaians the fundamental right to freely express themselves. It also guarantees a free media in Ghanaian society - and by implication full and open  access to the media for all Ghanaians. Today, that media access,  includes access to online social media platforms.

In an age in which social media platforms play an important role in the daily lives of hundreds of millions, and is an important global commercial platform for businesses, what Ghana's security agencies need to focus on, is to develop the capacity to pinpoint digital devices from which all kinds of online abuse and illegalities, such as hateful speech and internet fraud, emanate from - and use the latest technologies (as well as leverage international law enforcement networks) to locate, track down, apprehend and prosecute their owners, in the law courts. Nothing more, nothing less.

If they currently lack the capacity to do so, the Ghana Police Service can learn how to track down and  apprehend perpetrators of hateful speech online,  internet fraud and egregious falsehoods on social media platforms that slander others, from their German colleagues.

They could also replicate Germany's arrangements with Facebook, Google and Twitter to check such unspeakable abuses on their platforms. The Ghana Police Service ought to begin that conversation with Facebook, Google and Twitter now. Not tomorrow.

And if the IGP and the heads of the other security agencies want to stop troublemakers from ruining this year's presidential and parliamentary elections, on polling day, they must have a plan in place to monitor, and if need be, arrest, verbally-aggressive politicians of the ilk of the National Democratic Congress' (NDC) Robert Owusus and Solomon Nkansahs, and the New Patriotic Party's (NPP) Kennedy Ohene Adjapongs,  Maxwell Kofi Jumahs,  Bernard Antwi-Boasiakos and Nana Kofi Boakyes.

That will be a far more useful strategy than blocking access to online social media platforms.

What kind of message will we be sending to the international community if access to social media is blocked in Ghana on election day? Will it not destroy our global reputation as a stable and thriving African democracy? Our nation's ruling elites must not be so blinkered and shortsighted. Haaba.

Instead of blocking access to online social media platforms, the security agencies must rather monitor the leaders of highly-politicised civil society groups like the Let My Vote Count Alliance (LMVCA), who, rather than  using the law courts to achieve their objectives, seek instead to impose their will on society, through street demonstrations, and the use of aggressive and uncompromising language.

It is time all the illiberal individuals in our midst got the message: Ghanaians will never allow their nation to become a police state. Period.

Finally, for all those in our country who are attracted to the notion of "Buga-buga leadership" this blog is reproducing a culled article from Aeon magazine, which was written by Oxford University Emeritus Professor of Politics, Archie Brown, entitled: "We must stop worshipping the false god of the strong leader." It was edited by Aeon magazine's managing editor (Ideas), Sam Dresser.

It is our hope that most of Ghana's hard-of-hearing politicians,  the IGP, Mr. John  Kudalor, and all the heads of Ghana's other security agencies, and their advisors, will read it too.

Archie Brown is a political scientist and historian. In addition to being an Emeritus Professor of Politics at the University of Oxford,  he is also an Emeritus Fellow of St Antony’s College, at the same university. His most recent book is The Myth of the Strong Leader: Political Leadership in the Modern Age (2014).

Please read on:

"We must stop worshipping the false god of the strong leader

Politicians spend a lot of time trying to portray the leader they oppose as weak. They believe this resonates with a broader public. It’s not only in authoritarian regimes but in democracies, too, that the notion prevails that we need a strong leader. What is usually meant by that is a leader who concentrates a great deal of power in his (or her) hands, dominates public policy, calls the shots in the political party, and makes all the big decisions in government.

It is a recurring theme of Republicans in the United States that President Barack Obama is a weak leader. In Obama’s case, this is often linked to his failure to deploy US military force in distant trouble spots, even though the calamitous US experience from Vietnam to Iraq hardly suggests his caution is misplaced. The appeal of someone who very consciously projects an image of the strong leader is apparent in the support for the Republican frontrunner Donald Trump. The fact that his policies are a hodge-podge of wildly unrealistic aspirations – such as building a wall to keep Mexicans out of the US, and getting Mexico to pay for it – counts for less than Trump’s ability to persuade disillusioned conservative voters that his strong personality and mobilisation of their anger will somehow, in the words of his campaign, ‘Make America Great Again!’

Yet, whether we are talking about authoritarian regimes or democracies, the idea that the most admirable and successful leader is one who maximises his or her individual power is deeply suspect. In the case of totalitarian and authoritarian regimes, it is especially clear that a more collective leadership is a lesser evil than personal dictatorship. The Soviet Union, prior to the liberalisation and pluralisation of the system during Mikhail Gorbachev’s perestroika, was never less than highly authoritarian. But the USSR in the 1920s and in the period after Stalin’s death in 1953 was a less murderous place than it was during the years of Stalin’s personal dictatorship, which became absolute in the early 1930s. Similarly, China in the first half of the 1950s or in the years since Mao Zedong’s death in 1976 was and remains authoritarian, but the tens of millions who died in the Great Leap Forward and the hundreds of thousands who were killed in the Cultural Revolution were victims of Mao’s personal obsessions and of his power at its most untrammelled.

Overweening leaders within a well-established democratic system can, of course, do less harm than a Stalin or a Mao. Yet why should we heed calls to strengthen the hand of the prime minister and of 10 Downing Street rather than to strengthen collective leadership within the Cabinet and the political party? The mass media are constantly urging prime ministers and party leaders to do this, that and the other, bolstering the odd assumption that the leader is entitled to have the last word on everything.

It is puzzling why the idea persists that the more power is placed in a prime minister’s or president’s hands in a democracy, the better. It is high time to rebut the idea that the leader we should most look up to is one of unshakeable convictions, able utterly to dominate the political party, the Cabinet and the policy process. One-person domination is undesirable in principle in a democracy and it is fortunate that it is only rarely achieved in practice, whatever the leader’s pretensions.

Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair – in contrast with the more collective post-war British governments headed by Clement Attlee, Winston Churchill, Harold Macmillan, Harold Wilson and James Callaghan – sought to dominate the policy process. Their attempts to do so came unstuck in different ways.

A major contributory factor in Thatcher’s downfall was her overruling of the Chancellor of the Exchequer Nigel Lawson’s objections to the poll tax. To her own ultimate cost, she persuaded a majority of the Cabinet to endorse this extremely unpopular tax. Blair, in contrast, failed in his efforts to take the United Kingdom into the euro. He announced in the year 2000: ‘I will decide the issue of monetary union.’ Blair’s former trade and industry secretary Alistair Darling noted that Blair involved the Cabinet in the policy process more than was his custom in order to achieve that goal. In this case, however, the Chancellor of the Exchequer Gordon Brown prevailed. Brown, who was opposed to the UK entering into the common currency, easily outwitted Blair.

Politicians who like to think of themselves as strong leaders, or who are anxious to be perceived as strong, might be especially tempted by foreign adventures. The two most counterproductive British foreign policy decisions since the Second World War were the military intervention in Egypt in 1956, when Britain colluded with France and Israel, and the invasion of Iraq in 2003, with the UK as the junior partner of George W Bush’s US. In both cases – with Anthony Eden in charge in the first, and Blair in the second – the prime minister was the dominant player in committing UK troops to these wars of choice. In each case, they were less than fully frank with their Cabinet colleagues and paid scant attention to those in the Foreign Office and outside government who knew most about the Middle East.

Prime ministers and party leaders – unless they are as well grounded as a Stanley Baldwin or an Attlee – acquire an unrealistic belief in the exceptional quality of their judgment and corresponding right to pull rank and determine policy, sustained as these convictions are by their entourage and the ambitions of some of those around them. It is not altogether surprising that leaders should fall prey to arrogance and to seeing themselves as being above the party that elevated them to its leadership. What is more astonishing is that so many of the rest of us should undervalue collegial and collective decision-making. Party leaders and prime ministers were not chosen because they were deemed to have a monopoly of wisdom. It is time we stopped worshipping the false god of the strong individual leader."

End of culled Aeon magazine article, by Oxford University Emeritus Professor of Politics,  Archie Brown.