“Those who want to save their life will lose it…” Matthew 16:25
“Desire often creates paradoxical effects. The more you want something, the more you chase after it, the more it eludes you.” Robert Greene
The deeper lesson in the paradox of desire is not to say that there is an absolute negative return in longing for something. When Jesus said that those who seek to save their lives will lose it, he did not intend that his audience would suffer doom for seeking to liberate their souls from damnation. That would be an insult to the very gospel he preached.
The problem with those who seek to save themselves is that more often than not they do the things that destroy them. Such persons focus on the end rather than the means. But the problem with focusing entirely and narrowly on the end rather than the means to the goal is that the individual has no idea or has a delusional idea of what it takes to attain that goal. What happens then is that they are more likely to do the things that do not promote achievement of the goal. This is the case of the ‘unprecedented’ loss of Ghana’s president, John Dramani Mahama. He was the product of what many would call luck when he succeeded a deceased president in 2012 and later elected for a four-year term ending in January 2017. Like every president since the fourth republic, he wished to enjoy a two-term presidency for eight years. The result of his desire is now global knowledge; he lost his second bid for the presidency. Why? Many reasons have been provided but we want to focus on his actions and inactions – his unguided desire that cost him the election. The now ‘traumatized’ president has eased the burden of post-election analysts in his concession speech. The evils of the Mahama government in its desire to win the election are innumerable.
Firstly, after assuming office, he decides to surround himself with family and friends, whose qualifications were their ability to ridicule, insult, denigrate, and abuse everyone who attempted to question their infallible Mahama. And when we say everyone that does not exclude the king of Asogli State, Togbe Afeadi XIV, and the founder of the National Democratic Congress, former president Jerry John Rawlings.
Secondly, John Mahama did what will remain for a long time, the darkest moment of Ghana’s democracy in what has become renowned as the Montie3 Saga. A group of three reckless men, one journalist and two panelists, contemptuously vowed, on radio, to rape the chief justice and marry her off to a crook if the Supreme Court ruled in favor of a court case to compel the electoral commission to clean the 2016 voters register. The court issued contempt writs against the three for their callous threats and convicted them on their own plea of guilty to just four months in prison. In an unbridled attempt to appease party supports in the hope of winning the election, the president pardoned the three against national condemnation.
Thirdly, Mahama supervised the highest level of political comedy and development fiction in Ghana. Propagandists of the president and the president himself made fun of serious political concerns and claimed to have done things which do not exist, including building fictional senior high schools. When voters from across the country complained, they said it was not true, and that the nation was satisfied. Development had become so comical in Ghana that Mahama had to contract a professional comedian from Nigeria, the now infamous ‘Osuofia in Ghana Part 1 and 2.’ The respected journalist, Manesseh Azure Awuni, classically christened Mahama’s governance as the politics of ‘Borrowing, Building and Bragging,’ and that is what it has been these four years.
The fourth hasty and selfdefeating action was to reverse a terrible decision not to pay trainee nurses their allowances less than two months to the election. The fifth tragic move by Mahama to win the election was to invoke the ethnic creed. And he didn’t do this with respect. He fumed over why some of his brothers, the northerner people, were also calling for change. In this trend of desperation to return to the Flagstaff House in 2017, Mahama fell victim to the paradox of desire; the more he desired the presidency, the more he did the wrong things, and the more it eluded him. By seeking to save his pitiful life, the president prepared, facilitated, and hastened his passage to political doom and misery. Desire is good, but unguided and unhealthy political desires can herald the end of a politician’s career.
Is this an end to the Politics of Deception in Africa? It appears, from the successive losses of presidents Goodluck Jonathan, Yahya Jammeh of the Gambia who is rejecting the results, and president Mahama, that a new era of zero tolerance for the politics of deception has been born. Politicians can no longer cook beautiful promises, get elected on these promises, go further to wine and dine for their entire terms in office and expect to be re-elected. In civilized democracies like Ghana and Nigeria, it is not likely that citizens or the military would take over power from politicians who fail to live their promises.
But it is expected that voters will keep changing presidents so long as they keep deceiving them with utopian promises of development. If you promise the Ghanaian electorates to build factories in their districts, it is non-negotiable. It is either they see the factories or you are voted out, period! Ghanaians have set their country on the path of greatness as they consolidate their credential as the leading democracy in Africa. This discussion will continue in 2020, God willing.
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