Wednesday 22 September 2021

INT’L DIALOGUE: ECOWAS vs. Doumbouya. A case of ‘witches’ exorcising witchcraft?

 

Col. Mamady Doumbouya

While Ghana’s first President Dr. Kwame Nkrumah waited anxiously in Beijing, China, to make it home to Accra after the February 24, 1966 coup, he received many messages of political solidarity from heads of state across the globe.

African leaders were not left out of this well-wishing gesture. From Mali, President Modibo Keita sent in a note to Nkrumah. Albert Margai, then Prime Minister of Sierra Leone, also had his message received by Kwame Nkrumah.

“Please accept, my dear Brother, the assurance of my highest consideration, esteem and prayers for your personal well-being and safety,” parts of Margai’s message read. Nkrumah quotes this in his 1968 book, Dark Days In Ghana.

Political solidarity in such situations in international politics is a normal phenomenon. It, therefore, came as no surprise the apparent acrobatics of love and compassion the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) showed their colleague -- deposed President Alpha Conde.

On Sunday, September 5, 2021, Col. Mamady Doumbouya and his men toppled Mr. Conde who had been in power in Guinea since 2010. Mr. Doumbouya, a former French legionnaire was until his dramatic coup Alpha Conde’s darling-boy. As a matter of fact, as it is typical of most African heads of state, the deposed Guinean president ensured he had a tight grip on security around him so to help him cling on to power the way bees glue themselves to nectars.

Mr. Conde hatched a plan. He would fall on Mamady Doumbouya who had been trained in France and also said to have had several trainings in a couple of countries including being taught as an “operational protection specialist” at Israel’s International Security Academy. Aside Doumbouya’s enviable military credentials, his physique which makes him stand tall and robust like the baobab tree certainly might have been a contributory factor Mr. Conde considered him the best man to ward off “enemies” of the state.

This, in 2018, Mamady’s one-time boss -- Alpha Conde -- called him from France to Guinea to lead and man affairs of the then newly formed Special Forces Group (GFS). The former French legionnaire obliged, came down and headed the GFS. He did his master’s bidding and is said to have committed human right abuses in Guinea which made the European Union threaten sanctioning him together with some other 24 persons of the West African state.

In all this, the people of Guinea grew weary of Alpha Conde and what broke the camel’s back was when the now deposed president changed the country’s constitution last year. The change in constitution allowed Conde to stand for a third term in office which he won the elections amidst controversies. 

“When a handshake goes beyond the elbow,” our elders say, “it ceases to be a friendly gesture.” Doumbouya grew weary of Conde’s cling to power and would topple him on that Sunday. He had had enough of Alpha Conde’s ‘handshake’ that went beyond the elbows of Guineans.

The boy who arguably has been a faraway student of Ghana’s late President Jerry John Rawlings in his speech, after the coup, said: “If the people are crushed by their own elites, it is up to the army to give the people their freedom.” A quote he attributes to his mentor Rawlings.

It must be made clear that we condemn coup d’états with all the seriousness it deserves. That is one of the backward games drawing Africa’s progress behind. For this, we unreservedly condemn Mamady Doumbouya’s coup.

Nonetheless, one finds it difficult sympathizing with Alpha Conde considering the fact that he knowingly committed the first coup in his country. A democratic coup d’état for that matter. On October 14, 2019, Aljazeera reported in a news article -- dubbed “Several killed in Guinea protests against constitution change” -- the atrocities Conde’s stay in power was causing.

If we are to apportion blames then we cannot turn a blind eye on Conde’s first coup -- the constitutional change. Among the frivolous reasons that supporters of Alpha Conde gave for the change in the country’s constitution was that the president needed more time to finish his projects. One wonder’s the sort of progressive and productive projects (most) African leaders implement let alone to warrant them stay in office after their mandated terms have elapsed.

In Ivory Coast, President Alassane Ouattara also changed his country’s constitution to enable him stand for a third term in office. In March 2020, in the capital Yamassoukro, Mr. Ouattara tricked the world declaring he was poised not to go for a third term.  

Amidst cheers and applause, Alassane Ouattara said: “I have decided not to be candidate in the Oct. 31 presidential election and to transfer power to a new generation.” The Reuters reported. But that promise was short lived. When Ivory Coast’s Prime Minister Amadou Gon Coulibaly -- who was the candidate for Ouattarra’s Rally of Houphouëtists for Democracy and Peace -- died in July 2020, Mr. Ouattara went back to swallow his own ‘vomit’.

Again, one of the frivolous reasons given as in the case of Conde’s was that the supporters of the Rally of the Houphouëtists for Democracy and Peace need Alassane Ouattara to stay and go for a third term. Well, that was not supposed to be surprising anyway. The Ivorian President himself had earlier said that if his opponents including former President Henri Konan Bedie stood for the elections then he will equally contest again.

Ivory Coast's President Alassane Ouattara at the ECOWAS Summit


Ouattara’s March 2020 announcement and his subsequent moonwalk moves tell how cunning the African politician could be. Today, this is a man ECOWAS deemed fit to accompany its Chair, Ghana’s President Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo, to Guinea to pressure Mamady Doumbouya to step down and return the country to a civilian rule! Ouattara? The man who equally staged a coup by illegally changing his country’s constitution? It is nauseating when the pot gathers courage to tell the kettle it is black.

On July 24, 1993, when the heads of state and government of ECOWAS met in Cotonou in Benin to revise its treaty that aimed at seeing among other things the realization of good governance and promotion of democracy in the sub-region, Alassane Ouattara was present. Yes! He was by then Ivory Coast’s Prime Minister under President Félix Houphouët-Boigny’s regime. Mr. Ouattara appended his signature to the ECOWAS treaty and today he has flatly flouted what he stood for.

Still questioning ECOWAS’ moral right to advice Mr. Doumbouya, why was Togo’s President Faure Gnassingbe present at both the first hastily conducted emergency virtual summit and that of the September 15, 2021 held in Accra-Ghana? The crimes Alpha Conde committed that saw him toppled have been committed too in Togo and ECOWAS is silent on it.

Togo's President Faure Gnassingbe at the ECOWAS Summit


Was it not Faure Gnassingbe who equally changed his country’s constitution in 2019?  “The amendment means that Faure Gnassingbe is very much eligible to stand for reelection in the country’s polls slated for February 22, 2020. But, wait! That’s not all. Faure Gnassingbe could as well stand for the 2025 elections and rule till 2030 when he wins the people’s mandate,” we wrote in a February 12, 2020 article titled Faure Gnassingbe, a president for life?

If we are to mention names of ECOWAS’ heads of state and government one after the other -- or even that of Africa at large, the probability of each one of them being guilty as the Pharisees in John 8:7 will be high. “When they kept on questioning him [Jesus], he straightened up and said to them [Pharisees], ‘Let any one of you who is without sin be the first to throw a stone at her.’”

When Jesus said this to the Pharisees, they shamefully left one after the other. But Africans leaders, most of them if not all, are without shame. So, ECOWAS leaders are still busily pressuring Doumbouya over his coup. Can we ask the ECOWAS Chair why he attended Alpha Conde’s inaugural ceremony when he knew that the man had illegally changed his country’s constitution?

“On Tuesday, 15th December 2020, I was in Conakry, capital of the Republic of Guinea, to attend the swearing-in ceremony of His Excellency Alpha Condé,” wrote H.E. Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo on his Facebook wall. It must be stated that the ECOWAS Chair also attended Alassane Ouattara’s inauguration in same month even before he left for Guinea.   

Is it not the case that attending such third term inaugural ceremonies one directly or indirectly approves the illegality these power-drunk presidents commit?

Taking a cursory look at ECOWAS’ coercive diplomacy employed against Doumbouya, one is tempted to ask if it is not the case of ‘witches’ busily praying to exorcise witchcraft?

What we must take into account is that whereas then Guinea’s President Sékou Touré wholeheartedly welcomed Kwame Nkrumah, made him a co-president of the French speaking country as Guineans cheered him (Nkrumah) up in Conakry, in the same city in 2021, Guineans hooted at their own deposed President Alpha Conde. Two deposed presidents, two different narratives.

The people cheered on Mamady Doumbouya and his men for what appeared to them -- the masses -- a messianic saving mission from Conde’s brutal play with power.

In his book A Promise Land, Barack Obama in 2002 in responding to the then impending U.S. invasion of Iraq said at a rally that: “I don’t oppose all wars. What I oppose to is a dumb war.” Indeed, wars like coup d’états are atrociously bad but there comes a time when one finds sense in these and, going forward, ECOWAS leaders and heads of state in Africa at large must advise themselves accordingly. They must desist from thinking they owe the country which they govern and respect their citizens.

Failure to comply with this humble advice, their citizens will one day jubilate as Guineans are today and they will boldly proclaim and cheer on their respective soldiers in telling the world that they do not oppose all coups. That, what they oppose to is a dumb coup.

The writers are Ghanaian journalists who have interest in the world’s politics with an unflinching eye mainly on what pertains in Africa. Views expressed here are solely theirs and do not, in anyway, reflect the editorial policy of this media organisation.

Email: internationaldialogue2@gmail.com

Twitter: @abisolo7 & @aniwaba

 

 

Wednesday 8 September 2021

What to expect from ECOWAS’ Guinea emergency summit

 By Solomon Mensah


The Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) is expected to virtually hold an emergency summit at 2pm (1400GMT) today to be directed by the bloc’s Chair, Ghana’s President Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo.

The emergency summit follows Sunday’s coup that toppled President Alpha Conde who had previously pushed for constitutional change that saw him go for a third term in office.

Coup leader Mamady Doumbouya addressing Guineans on state television, on September 5, said that: “We will no longer entrust politics to one man, we will entrust it to the people.”

But ECOWAS in a statement condemned the coup, saying it does not condone unconstitutional political change.

Wednesday’s summit is expected to among other things reiterate the condemnation of the coup, impose sanctions on Guinea and possibly suspend the country from the regional bloc till governance is handed over to a civilian government.

Meanwhile, the soldiers have announced army officers as governors to man affairs of Guinea’s eight regions.

Wednesday 27 January 2021

TALKING DRUM: What Rawlings said in 1986!

On Sunday, January 17, 2021, I set off to meet two friends at the Shiashie bus stop in Accra. Jones Ronny Dedjo and Benjamin Tenkorang – professional photojournalists – were my classmates at the Ghana Institute of Journalism (GIJ) and are now helping roll the cameras for my talkshow ‘Talk To Solomon’ on the YouTube channel Aniwaba. 

We were to go to Abokobi to interview veteran journalist Teye Kitcher, who worked with the Ghana Broadcasting Corporation (GBC). Mr. Kitcher was the presidential correspondent to the Castle in the era the late Jerry John Rawlings was the head of state. Coming from different directions with a common destination of Abokobi, we agreed meeting at Shiashi. 

So, we moved together to Teye Kitcher’s house. I got to the Shiashie bus stop, longed to sit on a chair but there was none. What I saw could replace a seat was a metallic bar. I sat on it but that did not make me as uncomfortable as the pile of refuse at the bus stop that stared at me and other commuters. The very spot the refuse occupied should have had a dustbin placed there. The absence of a dustbin had commuters dumping their waste on the bare ground. I could not really fault those who dumped their waste there as I blamed persons mandated to ensure there was a dustbin in place. 

Benjamin came a few minutes after I had arrived and then Jones followed. While we sat in our vehicle and headed for Abokobi, I brought up the issue of the filth at the bus stop. Scenes of filth like the one seen at Shiashie have become so normal here in Accra and in almost all the other cities in the country. At Kaneshie – also in Accra – where the Accra Metropolitan Assembly has its waste management office, the place appears to be the Mecca of filth in Ghana. 

Well, at a point, we chipped in a different conversation and sped off to meet our interviewee. Today’s interview with Teye Kitcher will be the second after I first interviewed him three days after Rawlings passed away. In our first interview, he had mentioned that he still had in his archives some of the speeches Rawlings delivered as far back as the 1980s. 

To my surprise, the man who will turn 62-years soon (but looking evergreen) had placed a brown leather bag on one of the chairs in his living room. “Solo,” he said when he ushered us into the living room, “this is the bag. It contains some speeches of Rawlings and other stuff during my days at the Castle as a presidential correspondent.” We started the interview proper and asked him how he would feel seeing the remains of J.J Rawlings– the former president– laid in state on January 27, 2021. I knew what he was likely to say. 

Mr. Teye and Rawlings had become so close that the former could bare it all to the latter issues that worried him. The retired journalist once told me he even shared family matters with the former head of state. When your close friend is laid in state, that could physically and emotionally drain you and that was how difficult Teye Kitcher had presumed it will be for him. 

In the course of the interview, I asked him to get us some of the documents from his well-kept bag of archives. He stood up, brought a bundle of papers and started searching through them one after the other. “Address by the Chairman of the PNDC Flt. Lt. J.J. Rawlings,” read Mr. Kitcher after he pulled out one brownish-white paper, “at the occasion of the commissioning of the Accra City Waste Management Project at Kaneshie on Friday, 18th July 1986.” That was the heading of Rawlings’ speech. 

When Teye Kitcher read that, I told him I was interested in that particular paper and that he should read excerpts of it. “Madam Chairperson, PNDC Secretaries and Under Secretaries, Your Excellency, Nimei, Naamei, Distinguished Guest, Ladies and Gentlemen,” started Rawlings. 

Listening to Mr. Kitcher read this to me, I could imagine the sort of seriousness with which Rawlings read this himself. “[…] It is indeed true to say that this function provides yet another practical demonstration of the government’s commitment to strengthen the hands of Local Authorities with the ultimate aim of injecting maximum efficiency into the performance of their important function of providing essential services to the people.” Choosing Kaneshie to commission this project, I think, was strategic. 

As I mentioned earlier, Kaneshie today appears to be the citadel of Ghana’s filth and I presume it was as filthy in the 1980s as it is now. But, Rawlings’ drive to get Accra clean did not yield long-term results. In 2021, we are worse off than the late president imagined. Papa Jay, as many called him, knew the essence of best sanitation practices, hence, the coming into being of the Accra City Waste Management Project. Mr. Rawlings’ speech continued: “Madam Chairperson, the fact cannot be gainsaid that our major problem with the urban environment clearly lies in the area of sanitation. It is common knowledge that where healthy sanitation practices exist, the air we breathe and the water we drink and utilise for numerous domestic and commercial purposes will be free from pollution.” 

Why do we as a people perfectly know the results of best sanitation practices, yet we blatantly disregard such and live our lives as people who are lost on their bearings? At Kaneshie, Lapaz, Madina and all the suburbs of Accra, filth has engulfed us. Sadly, market women sell right at the spots where refuse are dumped while buyers and consumers busily buy consumables there. 

Are we normal? Why is it that for solid 35 years, we are still talking about unsanitary conditions in Accra and Ghana at large? If you happen to be a social science student or asked to describe Ghana, please don’t wrack your brain that much. In simple terms, Ghana is either a state without citizens or citizens without a state, arguably, the only country in the world where common sense appears so expensive a commodity. The John Dramani administration attempted to fix our mess but what they proposed as solution to the problem was actually a problem to the solution. 

They introduced the National Sanitation Day, which indirectly told citizens to fill their gutters with all their trash so they go back to clean it the first Saturday of every month. Is something not wrong with us? Then came the promise Messiah and his government. Then candidate Akufo-Addo promised Ghanaians Accra will be the cleanest city in Africa by the end of his first term. This task, to President Akufo Addo and his government, was so difficult and complex than the Russians manufacturing their S-300. 

So, they told Ghanaians the clean city promise will be delivered in their second term. A country of jokers? Not long ago, I had a chat with Bruno Sorrentino (a veteran journalist) who spent 20 years documenting the life of a girl. I told him how much I was impressed with his exemplary journalism of riveting storytelling. 

The documentary by Mr. Sorrentino that I watched on Aljazeera titled ‘Kay Kay: The Girl from Guangzhou’, had the journalist filming the little girl (named Kay Kay) every two years, starting from when she was two years. The purpose of the filming was to assess how Guangzhou and China would be like – in terms of economic growth – when Kay Kay had turned 20. “We can put up with all this dust and pollution if in the end it means business,” Kay Kay’s mother said in the film. 

The year was 1992 (when Bruno first filmed) and Guangzhou was sprouting like mushrooms. Twenty years came so quickly, Kay Kay had completed university looking for job and China had moved miles away from its gloomy past. When I had the chat with Bruno Sorrentino on January 10, 2021, it was my third time watching his documentary. 

If Bruno had come to Ghana to film a little girl or boy in Accra and witnessed the commissioning of the Accra City Waste Management Project, he would have wasted his time and resources on us. Ghana, a country so much blessed yet so poor in all aspects of its endeavour, is gracefully a disgrace state sitting on the surface of the earth. 

I am sorry to inform you that that Accra City Waste Management Project was even funded by the “Federal Republic of Germany and some friendly organisations of that country,” yet, we failed them! It is Sunday, January 24, 2021, and the time is 2:44am and I am here in my ghetto writing you this piece. I need to catch some sleep. But as I go to bed, if I tell you I have hope in Ghana I will be lying. 

My hope in Ghana is gone with the wind and it will only be resuscitated if only we are able to put our minds on “factory reset,” discard our backward behaviour and live as civilised people. 

The writer is a broadcast journalist with Media General. Views expressed here solely remain his and not that of his organization. Email: nehusthan4@yahoo.com Twitter: @Aniwaba Youtube: Aniwaba