“Differences are not intended to separate, to alienate. We are different precisely in order to realize our need of one another” (Desmond Tutu).
OTHER REMARKABLE MISCONCEPTIONS
It is insecurity, fear, narcissistic grandiosity and upbringing which drive members of certain ethnic groups to coil back into their ghettoized shells—part of the larger world of social cognition raised on an internalized platform of superiority complex—quite away from national dialogues on inter-ethnic socialization and also from the political mobilization of the creative prowess of diversity for development purposes, namely human capital management, and for internal cohesion.
Ethnic diversity offers itself as a powerful statement on the intelligential largesse of nature. Thus, the creative potential of ethnic diversity is worth harnessing for national development.
It therefore means we must make every effort to understand its existential operational intricacies and to appreciate it for what it really is. This has been the fundamental thrust of our arguments all along.
But, ethnicity diversity is a far more complex phenomenon than many of us think, in fact possibly beyond the capability of the human mind to understand.
Even science, perhaps one of the highest noetic states of human consciousness, does not appear to have all the answers.
Then there is that school of thought, which seeks to tendentiously conflate ethnicity and the bug of corruption in one fell swoop.
Of course when the true nature of a problem is not properly defined on the basis of boundary equations of intelligent assumptions, obviously any quest for practical, reliable or optimal solution(s) assumes a disturbing state of intractable illusion.
The lingering illusion of race and ethnicity is no different from the ignis fatuus which the so-called tachyonic particle presents in theoretical physics, say, although research conducted in the fields of pharmacogenomics, pathology and pharmacogenetics offers some interesting insights into the nagging complexities of race and ethnicity.
Man tends to objectify complex illusory ideas just to give them a reified character of simplistic representation in the finite immanence of noetic affirmation, as the process potentially brings some tentative finality to his nagging curiosity. This is why ethnicity cannot be reduced to criminality. Those who want to make corruption ethnic-specific are doing the nation and its people more harm than good—a great disserve to nation-building.
Public corruption has a national character which means that, in effect, it transcends the sentimental boundaries of ethnicity.
And, if we truly want to deal with the problem as effectively as we want it then we might as well look beyond ethnic fixation and focus on the bigger picture. No one is corrupt by virtue of his race or ethnicity.
Distortions in the human condition have a lot to do with some of the causes of criminality: Environment and peer pressure, greed and materialism, lost and lack of opportunities, poverty, laziness, ethnic prejudice and racial discrimination, and so on.
An interesting fact for us at this point in human existence is that scientists, for all intents and purposes, have not discovered an ethnic gene for corruption yet.
And this presumed discovery, if it can indeed be attained, probably remains far beyond the receding future of human understanding of the complexity of nature. Such a noble quest remains very far into the unforeseeable future—that is.
Still, we will not put this proposed query beyond the seemingly finite capability of human curiosity.
We should be extremely careful not to turn nativism into xenophobic oppression of our own citizens, for, after all, ethnic and racial purity is not absolute.
The seeming cultural conflicts between matriarchy and patriarchy for instance, provide an interesting permutation of conjugal-arrangement scenarios in which the biological product(s) of these scenarios assumes cultural definitions beyond the parochial cultural geography of what it means to be an “Akan.”
The question is:
Which ethnic group does a child produced from a conjugal arrangement in which the mother and the father come from patriarchal (Kusasi) and matriarchal (Akan) backgrounds, respectively?
What about the reverse?
From the perspective of just these two scenarios, the concept “Akan” ultimately assumes a loose or fluid definition of cultural identity in connection with a biological product(s) from such conjugal arrangements.
Finally, given that ethnicity is mostly culture-specific, one what wonders how the additional concepts of nationality, multiple citizenship, multiracial (miscegenation) and multiculturalism, etc., shape or contribute to the shifting dynamics of culture as a foundational character of ethnicity? We should be reminded that no culture has forever remained “genetically” original or autochthonous.
As a good example, is Kwame Anthony Appiah an Akan, American or British (English)?
CONCLUDING THOUGHTS
Political ethnocentrism and ethnic politics do shape or influence policy strategies in the important matter of development economics.
For one thing, some ethnic groups in certain regions around the country tend to vote for certain political parties and are in turn handsomely rewarded with grand infrastructural projects.
For another, those that do not tend to vote for a political party which eventually ends up in power are underserved in terms of infrastructure output.
Then there is the special case of ongoing infrastructural projects in certain regions which were reportedly discontinued, because voters of those regions did not allegedly vote for that party that ended up in political office.
Let us not however oversimplify these policy questions, for they are not simply questions of ethnicity or of identity politics.
It does happen that policy determination of these questions appeals to a set of complicated covariates insofar as the policy framology of the political economy of Ghana goes.
That is, a simplistic vista of these policy questions totally ignores the variable of strategic prioritization regarding national and regional needs, the standing health of the national and global economies, identitarianism, and public corruption.
All told, there exist political leaders who, while in political office, do relatively less for their native regions for fear of public backlash, derived from perceived notions of those political leaders diverting undue favoritism to their native regions—which we might call regional ethnocentrism.
Other leaders while in political office do a lot for non-native regions within the unitary political structure, yet their enormous efforts in this regard are largely ignored, even detested, possibly on the sheer basis of their regional ethnicity and party affiliation.
All these do not mean ethnic fixation is a necessary bad or negative thing.
Alternatively, it means that ethnic fixation is a good thing to the extent it offers a conceptual vista into the beauty of nature.
Ethnic diversity is a beautiful thing, more beautiful than Ayi Kwei Armah’s “The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born.”
Let us therefore learn to be politically correct with the moral language of the national discourse on ethnic diversity.
Ethnic balkanization and ethnic condescension are not the answer to our myriad problems.
Again, as a people still actively combating racism we should long have learnt to make technocratic and moral competence, hard work, meritocracy, and patriotic pragmatism—rather than ethnicity and religion—the focal points of political leadership and bureaucratic socialization.
It is our humble opinion that Ghanaians will reject ethnocentric exclusivists who aspire to political office in the land.
They should rather rally behind competent, hardworking, patriotic, and intelligent men and women with inclusive vision for the nation. In many important ways therefore, Bawumia is only good for the NPP brand so long as “northerners” follow him, not Akufo-Addo, to the ethnocentric party according to the skewed version of Anthony Karbo’s political philosophy.
Left to high-profile ethnocentric hegemonists like Yaw Osafo-Marfo and Madam Ursula Owusu-Ekuful the “Accra Northerner,” Bawumia, should be tending livestock in the north since he does belong in the Akan-centric NPP. Thus Bawumia’s northern extraction does not give him the right to gatecrash the entrenched privilege of resource-rich, upper-echeloned Akans within the ethnocentric NPP.
Perhaps Bawumia is hypocritically celebrated in the ethnocentric elephant party not because he is uniquely endowed with any economic prowess, but rather because of the potential of his convenient presence in the ethnocentric NPP to peel away votes from the north that have traditionally gone to the NDC.
But Haruna Atta’s cautionary reminder potentially bespeaks Bawumia’s place in the NPP as a dispensable digesta. In a word therefore, the soul of the NPP is marinated in a political ideology of Akan exceptionalism, ethnocentric hegemony and presumed superiority, indispensable subtexts of Arthur Kennedy’s text “Chasing the Elephant into the Bush: The Politics of Complacency.”
This marinade of ethnocentric hegemony, presumed superiority and exceptionalism is rather more complicated than Kennedy’s simplistic politics of complacency. Maybe “complacency” is just not an apposite titular description for this important book, since an internecine duopoly based on a tacit—even explicit—principle of ethnic supremacism underpins the political rivalry between Akyems and Asantes within the NPP.
This strange current of ethnic sepremacism tends not to make room for non-Akans, especially northerners, in the highest hierarchy of the NPP. Affirmative-action tokenism has therefore been a means through which some non-Akans, such as Bawumia, have managed to gatecrash the privileged comfort of Akans within the NPP.
All this is not to say everything in the NDC is rosy as far as equitable ethnic distribution in political and cabinet appointments is concerned. It apparently is not. Yet, the sharp contrasts between the NPP’s politics of exclusion and the NDC’s politics of inclusion make eloquent sense in the moral language of relativism, and leaves much to be desired.
Lest we are not misunderstood, this is not a direct or indirect endorsement of any political party or leader in the country today. Ghanaians must make the decision or choice themselves since we cannot speak in their behalf.
Of course, we agree that it may not be easy to displace either the NDC or the NPP from the political scene but suggestion is worth a try. Ghanaians need to move past these two major political parties.
What happened to the Ghanaian noetic faculty? Has the Ghanaian’s subterranean anoetic faculty completely taken over his autonoetic consciousness?
Where are Mandela’s and Tutu’s ubuntu, Nkrumah’s African Personality, Asante’s Afrocentric self-knowledge—episodic memory, and finally, Appiah’s cosmopolitanism?