Ghana, Syria and the Lessons

By olusegun Adeniyi

The moment I stepped out of church last Sunday and checked my phone, I saw a missed call from my friend, Mustapha Sanah (HRH Dalun-Lana Tapha Mahamadu II). He had left a terse message: “Prepare for inauguration.” I surmised that former President John Dramani Mahama and candidate of the main opposition National Democratic Coalition (NDC) had won the Ghanaian presidential election held last Saturday. In my conversation with Mahama at his Accra residence on Friday, 20th September, he predicted he would win the election and promised that I would be his guest at the inauguration. (https://www.thisdaylive.com/index.php/2024/09/26/ghanas-future-beyond-jollof-rice/)

But before I could respond to Mustapha, breaking news flashed on my mobile phone that the 54-year-old father-and-son dictatorship in Syria had been upended by rebel forces. President Bashar al-Assad had reportedly fled Damascus, leaving his country in tatters. The fall of Assad is a testament to the fragility of power that is neither ennobling nor geared towards the common good. “As recently as 2010, Syria had a higher per capita income than many of its neighbours. Since 2011, well over half a million have died and several million displaced,” according to Nilanthan Niruthan, a defense analyst and researcher at Columbia University, United States. “The UNHCR estimated earlier this year that at least 90% of the Syrian population live under the poverty line, conditions which would have certainly worsened in the last week.”

While it remains to be seen how the disparate rebel groups in Syria will work together to govern the war-torn country, the consequences of toppling Assad are far-reaching. “The Arab Spring started in Tunisia (in 2011) but claimed scalps in Egypt, Libya, and Yemen,” argues Dr Michale Rubin, a director of policy analysis at the Middle East Forum and former Pentagon official. “Assad’s ouster and similar dynamics in some regional countries may soon claim scalps of other long-term dictators.” I hope that message will resonate on a continent where 91-year-old Paul Biya of Cameroon has been president for the last 42 years despite being marooned mostly in a Geneva, Switzerland hotel; 82-year-old Teodore Obiang Nguema Mbasogo of Equatorial Guinea has been in power for the past 45 years; 80-year-old Yoweri Museveni has ruled Uganda for the past 38 years and Isaias Afwerki has been the first and only president of Eritrea since independence in 1993. The message will also serve many others, including Faure Gnassingbe of Togo who succeeded his father, Gnassingbe Eyadema two decades ago and appears to be plotting for his son to succeed him.

There is a way in which we can connect what happened in Ghana and Syria because both have to do with power and popular will. But for the benefit of Nigerian politicians who may have a superficial reading of Mahama’s victory, the first thing they must understand is the discipline of Ghana’s politicians and the strength of their political parties. The Independent National Electoral (INEC) Chairman, Mahmood Yakubu alluded to this earlier in the week. “Rarely in Ghana do you see people moving from one party to another with every general election,” Yakubu said. “There are people who have supported political parties for many years. So, whether the party is in power or opposition, they stick to the political party.”

That, of course, is not the situation in Nigeria where expediency rather than principle dictates our politics. For instance, many of the politicians who were either in the main opposition Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) or Labour Party (LP) before the last election have moved to the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC). In a milieu in which public service has been reduced to ‘eating’, a politician can be a PDP member in the morning, decamp to the LP in the afternoon and by evening, he could be attending the APC meeting as the board of trustees’ chairman! In the past few days, five LP members and one PDP member in the House of Representatives have decamped to the APC. Quite naturally, the one who attracted the most attention is Donatus Matthew, the commercial motorcycle (Okada) rider who defeated a fourth-term member in Kaura Federal Constituency of Kaduna State. When you move from riding Okada to cruising around in a N160 Million SUV within a matter of weeks, what is the big deal about dumping the party on which you came to power, even if the law is not on your side?

The situation is different in Ghana which perhaps explains why the election of Mahama came as no surprise. The foundation was laid four years ago at the 2020 presidential election. Although Mahama (president between 2012 and 2016) lost the last election, his party (NCC) took 31 parliamentary seats from the ruling NPP. With both parties winning the same number of seats (137 each) resulting in a hung parliament, the lone independent candidate, Andrew Asiamah Amoako supported the NDC candidate, Alban Sumana Kingsford Bagbin, to emerge as speaker. If that was Nigeria, not only would the lone independent candidate pitch tent with the ruling party but many members from the opposition party would also have followed him to decamp. Besides, can anyone imagine a Nigerian President in a similar scenario allowing the lawmakers to pick their presiding officer without interference, as then re-elected President Nana Akufo-Ado did? If it were here, even the court would be deployed in a diabolic manner to give comfort to the ruling party!

In its statement on the Ghana election, the PDP said it portends an ominous omen for the APC at the coming 2027 poll. “The verdict of the people of Ghana in this presidential election is a signal to the APC that its days in office are numbered as the power of the people in Nigeria, just like in Ghana, will surely prevail, end APC’s oppressive rule and return Nigeria to the path of good governance, security, political stability and economic prosperity on the platform of the PDP in 2027,” according to a statement by the PDP National Publicity Secretary, Debo Ologunagba. But what the PDP must understand is that defeating an incumbent (ruling party) requires the creation of a strategic coalition in which personal ambitions would be sacrificed for group goals. Unfortunately, I have not seen any such effort from the opposition parties in Nigeria whose leaders seem not to have learnt any lesson from the last election won by the incumbent with just 37 percent of the total vote cast.

I spent my one-year Fellow’s programme at the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, Harvard University (during the 2010/2011 academic session) researching why it is so difficult for candidates of ruling parties to lose elections in Africa. In the process, I discovered that competitive presidential elections held on the continent in the preceding two decades resulted only in four percent defeat and 96 percent victory for the ruling parties. When I applied the principle to the rest of the world, I found the same trend. Ruling parties (and incumbents) were defeated at the polls in only seven percent of cases, winning 93 percent of the time. At the end, I was able to identify fractionalized opposition as the main factor in competitive elections.

As I was working on the paper, which I eventually titled “Divided opposition as boon to African incumbents” (https://scholarsprogram.wcfia.harvard.edu/publications/divided-opposition-boon-african-incumbents), Nigeria was preparing for the 2011 general election that had then incumbent President Goodluck Jonathan standing against Major General Muhammadu Buhari (rtd). Feeble attempts to form an opposition platform around Buhari and (current president) Bola Tinubu had collapsed. So, when the election held and Buhari lost, I adapted my research paper to write an article which I titled “Divided They Run, United They Lose: How Fractionalized Opposition Strengthens African Incumbents”.

In the piece, I stated clearly that Buhari should not locate his defeat on rigging or the factor of incumbency but rather on his (Buhari’s) inability to build a credible opposition coalition. “While not advocating against the legal option already taken by a section of the Nigerian opposition, my contention is that it is more productive for them to begin to plan and organize for future elections. The perennial narrative that they are rigged out by the ruling party is becoming hollow,” I wrote for THISDAY in May 2011 at a period I was still in the United States. “In a milieu where political parties are not only weak but also lack financial wherewithal with no ideology binding members together, forging an electoral alliance is a long and arduous task. Waiting till weeks or days to the election to begin the process for such an alliance is therefore no more than an open invitation to a sure defeat.”

Four years later, my thesis proved accurate when the same opposition parties galvanised to form a special purpose vehicle (SPV) now called APC to win the 2015 presidential election. While the political system in Ghana is not perfect, they have erected certain moral guardrails for their politicians and public office holders that we have not succeeded in doing. I highlighted a few in my September column, ‘Ghana’s Future: Beyond Jollof Rice’, following my visit to the country. Like Nigeria, Ghana is a multiparty democracy. But their politicians have coalesced around two strong parties with distinct ideologies. Therefore, to achieve the kind of alternation that has strengthened democracy in Ghana, our politicians must muster the discipline to enthrone a two-party structure. In their own enlightened interest, Nigerian politicians must also works towards that if our democracy is to survive and thrive.

Meanwhile, there is a way in which we can connect the election of Mahama in Ghana to the toppling of Assad in Syria. The former is about popular democracy anchored on the will of the people and the latter, a fall-out of a charade in which citizens were conscripted to legitimise a compromised process that had nothing to do with the public good. We must learn from both countries. Without any doubt, the political system in Ghana is miles ahead of Nigeria’s. Our politicians are a mixed bag of cheap crooks and a few good people. That explains why violence and fraud have become part of the DNA of our politics while the industrialization of electoral disputes has become a revenue source for a corrupt arm of the judiciary. In Syria, the fate that ultimately befell Assad should serve as a cautionary tale for Nigeria regarding the consequence of a leadership living above and removed from the deprivation of the populace.

Just three years ago in May 2021, Assad (whose father ruled Syria for 30 years until his death in 2000) won a fourth term in office with 95.1% of the votes in a sham election that extended his rule till 2028. From being a maximum ruler with power of life and death over citizens, Bashar Al-Assad is now no more than a fugitive in Russia where he has been granted political asylum. Perhaps the signature lesson of his fall, for those in leadership positions who exhibit insensitivity and callous indifference to the plight of their people, is the transient nature of power. And nobody can forever evade accountability.

• You can follow me on my X (formerly Twitter) handle @Olusegunverdict and on www.olusegunadeniyi.com