The other day, a brilliant Citi FM morning show host invited a prominent NPP politician to an imaginary humiliation chair, for a harsh dressing-down about why no politician in the fourth republic qualified to compare records of superior achievement. What is there to compare, the award-winning journalist asked? He ended a charged morning rant by cataloging basic problems like poor sanitation, roads that look like accident traps, public corruption, power theft and lack of beds in our hospitals.

Leaders from the two dominant political traditions have superintended over this economic malaise and poverty since 1992.

Democracy under attack

There is another layer of comparison that the journalist may need to study, to appreciate the depth of what he described as a national joke–the record of gravitas and the weight of personalities who receive petitions.

Last week, we took the joke to an octave when the NPP and the NDC tore into each other about who presents the worst material to receive petitions, drawing from the experiences of Senior Presidential Staffer Nana Yaa Jantuah and Lawyer Kwame Asare-Boateng, a director of security at the Bank of Ghana.

The NDC caricatured him as a security officer who didn’t have the ‘weight and gravitas’ to receive a petition for the Governor.

When minority leader Alex Afenyo-Markin refused to present the petition from the ‘Democracy Under Attack’ protest to Nana Yaa Jantuah, he did not only unwittingly attack the personality of the presidential staffer, he assailed the very ethos of our Ghanaian culture, especially our values of respect, hard work, public service and sacrifice.

Instead of the contents of the petition, the minority leader’s petition about the weight of Nana Yaa Jantuah, went viral: “To nominate only you to come and receive the petition amounts to disrespecting us as a political party”.

As in the case of the Bank of Ghana petition, public commentary following the ‘Democracy Under Attack’ protest has witnessed a razzmatazz of the political profiles, achievements and ambitions of politicians, rather than a cocktail of pressing matters that formed the petition, particularly the alleged assault on free speech, roadblocks in bail applications and recent incarcerations over insults.

Razzmatazz of ambitions

Key NPP members contend that the overarching catalyst of the protest was the sudden acquittal of former MASLOC boss Sedina Tamakloe Ationu, in the face of overwhelming evidence of corruption and sleaze.

The other catalyst may be the 20 year jail term for Chairman Wontumi.

The latent reason for the protest, however, is what Afenyo-Markin calls ‘You do me, I do you’ sub-culture in our body politic.

The NPP has promised to reinstate CJ Gertrude Torkonoo if they come back to power.

Perhaps, it serves their purposes that politicians and people who pretend to have built social capital, are necessarily ambitious, except that they do not realise how obnoxious they sound when they pretend to be ambitious.

They may also not realise that the word ‘ambitious’, from the Latin root ‘ambitiosis’, meant a person who is eager for public office.

It wasn’t until the 1700s that the word transformed in meaning to denote something positive about achieving goals or gaining public respect.

The next time a group of people present a petition on our behalf, they are waging a campaign to project their own importance, not so much our grievances.

Otherwise, it shouldn’t matter who receives a petition on behalf of the president.

If every petitioner’s task is to deliver the cold grievances in a petition for a superior officer’s attention and redress, then a faceless creature could dangle a basket in front of a noisy crowd to receive the scrolls.

In the Roman empire, the emperor appointed a ‘magister a libellis’, a dedicated administrative staff, to receive ‘libelli’ (petitions).

The magister reviewed a stack of petitions and replied to them as he deemed fit. Rarely, the senate received petitions for the emperor.

President Nana Yaa Jantuah

In our current democratic arrangement, a petitioner may or may not present a petition to the government depending on the gravitas the recipient wields.

After the showdown between leader Afenyo-Markin and Nana Yaa Jantuah, the NPP quickly scaled down the pedigree of the people presenting their petition, reshuffling their ranks to produce a deputy women’s organizer to do the presentation.

Similarly, the NDC went away without presenting their petition to the lawyer they mistook for a watchman. Then Majority leader Dr Ato Forson, charged: “we will be back”.

Today, we know the impressive profile of Kwame Asare-Boateng, Esq.

I sat in the same lecture hall with him at the University of Ghana.

A gentleman par excellence, he was a bibliophile who showed superfluous hunger for academic work, combining military discipline with rare scholarship to qualify as a lawyer.

He served as Deputy Director of the Legal Directorate of the Ghana Air Force.

When he took the job as Director of Security at the Bank of Ghana, he had retired as Wing Commander, after serving the Ghana Armed Forces for 26 years.

He laughed away when I asked him about the ‘watchman’ tag by the politicians. That is quintessential Kwame.

Before Nana Yaa Jantuah’s remarkable work in reputational intelligence at the PURC, she had individuated herself as a thoroughbred and a PR titan decorated with an honorary doctorate.

She may not have received Oxford education like her father, but she has the academic and professional gravitas Oxford can afford anybody.

She was the first female general secretary of a political party in Ghana.

If every politician’s ambition is to be president, Nana Yaa Jantuah could be president to whom petitions may be addressed.

Let’s see who she nominates to receive them.

Tissues Of The Issues

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