Ghana’s fourth republic has delivered some successes in democratic governance, and even a few instances of great political leadership, but it has also left some unenduring lessons on how not to govern a country.

Those lessons constantly question the true intentions of the people who have led us.

For instance, one of our presidents is suspected to have told close aides that the best way to win power is to use foolish people (yede nkwaseafo na epe tumi).

For his efforts, a loudmouth who feeds his ego and money with laughable bad English, won the chairmanship of a political party in a big region, over a brilliant lawyer.

Cheap vs expensive buga

That was the genesis of what a popular politician recently called ‘Bugarism’.

In football parlance, to play ‘buga’ is to sacrifice all rules of decent sportsmanship and fair play, and launch savage attacks, often to harm the opponent and kick them out of the game.

If the attacker was clever enough to have kicked the opponent in the groin without the referee noticing, he may even be considered an intelligent bugaman.

Even if he was spotted and dismissed from the game, the ‘buga’ may be rewarded if that savagery was the only strategy that incapacitated the opponent or prevented them from winning.

If fairplay doesn’t win, play it hard and cold.

Take a quick glance at what has transpired in our politics recently, and you may spot traces of ‘bugarism’ all over.

These are a few recent examples: An extortion allegation against the minority leader of Ghana’s parliament over a matter of Goldbod losses, literally turns buga buga.

An alleged leaked letter from a deputy minority leader in parliament, purporting to return a 70,000Gh vetting bribe, is denied as buga tactics from detractors.

Then a Chief Justice is dealt heavy buga blows for expressing satisfaction that state agencies are making profits.

It also shows in the ‘trending’ insults and invidious commentary from followers of the two dominant political traditions.

These days, what used to be commonly tolerated as spin, is properly despised or effectively celebrated as ‘Jandam’, where pure untruths and palpable lies are trumpeted with depths of intimidating aggression and skill unknown to Joseph Goebbels, Adolph Hitler’s propaganda strategist.

But perhaps the cheapest political buga is when creatures in cyber space recently descended on the marriages of highly placed politicians.

Degrees for Pedigree

You would think that people who deal in bugarism and are proud to reward its excesses, would not care much about intellectualism and hygiene in our politics.

Strangely, the same electorate who hail politicians when they bash dissenting political voices by merely equalizing or promising hell when power changes hands, also expect public officers to have great common sense in addition to a university degree or two, to measure their pedigree.

A PhD may count more if GTEC is happy with it. These days, a law degree gets you there quicker, if you know your law.

Even those who are well known buga players, and have earned it as part of their name, such as the NPP’s Chairman Buga (proper name Masawudu Osman), are eager to put their intellectual foot forward–ahead of their buga identity.

When Chairman Buga’s academic credentials were questioned when he threw his hat in the NPP’s 1st Vice-Chairmanship race, he excited his followers by listing three university degrees he had accumulated.

Unlike others before him who publicly boasted that good English and Harvard academic qualifications are disincentives to big money, Chairman Buga extolled the huge importance of education in our politics and boasted that he has the twin advantages of “intellectualism and bugarism”.

We have a fair idea of how the tacky combo of intellectualism and bugarism has left inglorious footprints in our politics.

Regrettably, there are political traditions that pride themselves on their violent antecedents.

Others have managed to convince us that they came forth bearing books and not arms, and quoting Shakespeare, Nietzsche and Abraham Lincoln, instead of chanting revolutionary songs. Today, we look at the two traditions and wonder whether they have swapped identities.

Third force

In the early 1990s, there was some intentionality to strike a difference between the two traditions.

In Secondary schools and universities, students proudly wore Danquah-Busia badges to flaunt their intellectual credentials.

The NDC, freshly out of the PNDC military character, was not seen as part of the intellectual community.

Today, the party boasts some of our most intelligent men and women and role models. Yet the two traditions are guilty of spin and rough buga.

They say the same things in different ways, and sometimes the same way until we wonder whether it was Sammy Gyamfi or Miracles Aboagye who said it first.

Thankfully, the internet calls the truce when we forget who said what, when.

The people who misspoke yesterday, may sound exactly like those we associate with decent speech.

As a result, not many of us are confident to accuse the other of intellectual dishonesty.

Similarly, we seem to have lost confidence in our degrees.

Even before GTEC started to clamp down on PhDs and other advanced degrees, especially those from abroad, we had quietly been waging our own impact assessment campaign.

We have had Harvard. Yale. Cambridge. Oxford. Stanford. Warwick. McGill. Legon.

Their intellectualism seems to have brought us to where Chairman Buga’s bugarism left us. Maybe we need a third force: those who are neither intellectual nor buga.

Those who have the intelligence to defy bugarism and boot away hollow intellectualism.

Tissues Of The Issues

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Ottawa, Canada