Does Ghana need National Reconciliation? (Forum).

On 25 August, the London-based TV production company, Ghana Inside-Out, recorded another of its programmes meant to be shown on Ghana TV. The series, according to the producer Barima Adu-Asamoa, is to give the Ghanaian diaspora the opportunity to air their views on the way forward for the country. Earlier programmes had dealt with the economy, debt and HIPC. This time the topic was: "Does Ghana need a national reconciliation commission?" (see our last month's issue, p IS). Major (rtd) Kojo Boakye Djan who led the June 4 Uprising in 1979 faced questions from a panel of four experts and the studio audience. Below is an abridged version of Major Djan's main submission.

"I must state my position right from the onset. I have been, I am, and I will always remain committed to the need to set up a commission of some sorts to go into our troubled past.

My track record here is now a matter of public knowledge. In February 1980 and in July 1981, I held two press conferences in Accra, each time with one other officer colleague on the Armed Forces Revolutionary Council (AFRC), to call for a probe into the AFRC and our immediate past then.

It is only now, close to 22 years after that initial call, that there appears to be a chance that our call will be acted on. And for that I am genuinely grateful to the Kufuor administration. And that I cannot wait for a properly constituted commission to start its work.

It is in this light, therefore, I find it both disappointing and worrying that the National Reconciliation Commission bill and its accompanying memorandum do not appear to me to be capable of achieving even the government's own declared intention of bringing about a lasting national reconciliation in Ghana.

For today, as 22 years ago, I am still convinced that if we are to be seen to be genuinely and objectively interested in wanting to come to terms with our past, then any commission must be made to address certain fundamental issues and in the form and manner that in the end will reflect the total concerns of all of our people.

In my reading of the bill and its memorandum, I am unable to find that this all-important criterion has been met satisfactorily.] I have therefore decided to submit suggestions to parliament in Accra. It is hoped that parliament will take into account my submissions before the bill is finally passed into law.

The government's bill

The government s proposed bill, entitled The National Reconciliation Act 2001, is clearly intended to lead to an Act:

"To establish a commission to seek and promote national reconciliation among the people of this country by recommending appropriate redress for persons who have suffered any injury, hurt, damage, grievance or who have in any other manner been adversely affected by abuses and violations of their human rights arising from activities or in activities of public institutions and persons holding public office during periods of unconstitutional government and to provide for related matters".

Read with the qualifying object and functions of the commission in the bill and similar passages liberally dispersed in the memorandum, the above passage can be said to capture the spirit and the letter of both the intent and scope of the bill.

They also sum up for me the principal weaknesses of the bill. First, its name and the circumstances of its historical application can easily be shown to be irrelevant to the unique Ghanaian conditions it is being asked to address. Second, the demands on it as an alien import, have imposed on the bill an intent and scope that is too narrow and abstract. And finally, in structural form and operations it also has many glaring deficiencies.

My first problem is with the choice of national reconciliation as the strategic objective for the commission. National reconciliation may be a solution for other countries with troubled past. But I submit that national reconciliation as a solution to Ghana's unique troubled past is inappropriate and therefore unlikely to achieve the results we all desire.

Let me explain my point with brief illustrations from cases in three regions in the world where national reconciliation has either been used or are likely to be used. These are South Africa in Southern Africa; Argentina, Brazil, Chile and El Salvador in Latin America; and Sierra Leone and Liberia in West Africa.

Until recently, South Africa was dominated by a minority white settler regime which decided that the majority black population was subhuman and therefore must be set apart legally and denied any normal human intercourse.

When that position became untenable after years of severe repression, the apartheid regime was persuaded to move into a multi-racial society. In the transition, a national reconciliation, as a formula, was needed to hold together a society without legal apartheid but still with communities set apart by the privilege of wealth, colour and politics.

Although in Latin America the situation was substantially different, the use of the national reconciliation formula is understandable. Here, the steady influx of European immigrants since the 15th century, ended up with these white immigrant majority dominating the natives and the imported ex-slaves from Africa now shoved into reserves and shanty towns, with state apparatus and the privilege of wealth and colour, in practically every country.

When in the context of the Cold War, rebels from the dominant immigrant class decided to win state power and use it to bring the underclass into the mainstream or instigate the underclass to challenge their dominance from outside, these rebels were declared communists and pursued accordingly with repression and coups.

After the Cold War, it makes sense to use national reconciliation to win over the dissidents into the family fold while still maintaining the status quo.

The situation of both Liberia and Sierra Leone with experiences of repression and counter-repression on a scale unknown in the rest of West Africa, provides yet a third gloss -- a hybrid if you like, between South Africa and Latin America.

Here also the black on black viciousness tends to provide a smokescreen behind a struggle for supremacy between the natives and the returning ex-slaves in the two countries. In the end, it is my forecast that only a dose understanding of this essential dividing line and a formula of reconciliation for these two countries can help resolve their problems.

Ghana's situation

In Ghana, the situation is totally different. There has never been, in Ghana, an overlay of minority or majority immigrant white or black settler regimes on natives and other members of an underclass. There has never been, and there never will be the need, therefore, to resolve that kind of contradiction with a reconciliation formula.

The real problem here is simply this: that the commission is intended to provide a platform for perpetrators to come face to face with their victims, confess their crimes against their victims and somehow it is expected that the bitterness generated by these crimes in the past will go away.

For those who have suffered real hurt, injury and loss against the power and the gains of some of their perpetrators, nothing can be further from the truth. For the solution rests on emotional catharsis which is non-negotiable nor a measurable commodity. It can be a tricky business here.

The clearest proof of the weakness of the commission project is that since its inception, it has been made to struggle with its periods to be investigated. It started targeting PNDC [the Rawlings era] only. Then it added AFRC. Now it has been lifted to include SMC I and SMC II, NRC and NLC [the military governments of 1978, 1972 and 1966]. On this evidence, it may reach the time of Adam!

There has also been incoherent noises about the exclusion from the remit of the commission the question of the loss and gains to, first, the state; and then, to our collective rights as citizens of Ghana during the periods to be investigated.

Even at the level of the individual, where the commission purports to concentrate its efforts, it has not been directed to target in a comprehensive manner the balance of both the loss and gains to liberty, life and assets. It is only on loss to life and assets.

Two issues on the form and structure of the commission also need to be addressed. The first is the membership. Here, there is the potential for conflict of interest of members who have in the past associated closely with the activities of the periods to be investigated.

Besides, there appear to be no room for institutional representation of key players during the period to be investigated. The nomination process must be made to take up these issues.

Recommended changes

What has happened in Ghana is nothing more or less than a simple act of and its prosecution between factions within the political class for state office and power left vacant by the retreating colonial power.

It is this cycle of politically motivated violence, sponsored more often than nor by local political factions in concert sometimes with their allies abroad, for state office and power which is the heart of the matter.

In its intensity, it has ranged from low to medium conflict -- sometimes with battle-lines, sometimes without. It fails more often than it succeeds in its objectives of seizing state office and power.

Its periods are self-defined. It all started in October 1954 when E.Y. Baffoe, an NLM official and a defector from CPP, was stabbed to death by Twumasi Ankrah, a CPP agent, in Kumasi.

From then on Ghana was plunged into a sustained period of civil unrest until 23 February 1966. On 24 February 1966, Ghana experienced the first ever military-cum-police unconstitutional government.

Again from that time to 6 January 1993, Ghana was ruled with unconstitutional governments punctuated only by two brief interludes of constitutional governments from 22 August 1969 to 12 January 1972, and from 24 September 1979 to 30 December 1981.

The one thing that runs through these periods is the politically motivated violence for state power and office. In this context, the wrangle over cut-off periods for the proposed commission becomes a sideshow. They are truly evident and self-defined.

What is required at this stage then, is for the parties to this low-level war, clearly identifiable over the years, to sue for peace as a signal to the end of the conflict.

An agreed peace accord should then be followed by a comprehensive settlement programme that can be seen to be fair and just to all affected parties. For me, there can be no better mechanism to do this than a Peace and Settlement Commission. I, therefore, propose its acceptance to parliament.

Peace and Settlement Commission

With proper direction, this Peace and Settlement Commission will do all what the proposed National Reconciliation Commission is expected to do and many more with a distinctive advantage.

It certainly will command a wider acceptance at home and abroad. An expanded remit of the commission will include a provision for findings and recommendations in the following three basic areas:

(a) To provide, as far as possible, a fair and accurate description of what really happened in the self-defined periods of politically motivated violence for office and power in Ghana, the justification or otherwise of the circumstances leading to any attempted or successful violent changes, and finally the identification of both the agents and targets for and during those changes.

(b) To derail the aggregate of the consequences for what happened in the self-defined periods. In this, the commission must be guided by the principle of the balance of gains and losses, legal or otherwise to (1) Ghana as a state and our collective public rights and interests; and (2) life, liberty and assets of any individual members of the general public and the need for remedies and commendations in the form of decorations, reparation, restitution and sanctions where necessary.

(c) To make any appropriate recommendations for action that in their totality are likely to provide safeguards against a repeat or continuation of our troubled past.

Other matters

One way of resolving the conflict of interest of members who have in the past associated closely with the activities of the periods under investigation is to add six more members to the proposed seven. The six members will be allocated to the armed forces, the police and the four political parties with representation in parliament either as ex-officin or full members.

This institutional representation can be justified on the grounds that in the main they have been the key players in the politically-motivated violence for office in Ghana.

The provision on the representation by a lawyer at proceedings should be varied to take into account the two classes of persons likely to appear before the commission and payment for their costs.

There are those who will be subpoenaed to appear before the commission and others who may appear to make claims in their own right. They should all be entitled to appoint a lawyer to be present who shall be paid from a Legal Aid Fund to be set up and be a charge on the Consolidated Fund.

But the qualifying proviso in the case of the voluntary witness is that in the end the commission must find claims by witness not to be frivolous and vexatious. In other words, the commission must accept evidence here as coming from a witness of truth before claims for legal costs can be accepted for payment.

I must finally register my total agreement with the concluding paragraph of the memorandum which says that: "It is time we freed, as much as humanly possible, the future from the debris of the past, and thereby enhance the possibilities of consolidating and deepening the hold of democracy and respect for human rights and the rule of law over our country.

But I cannot accept the succeeding suggestion that this is: "the best basis on which to tackle with unity of purpose and action the enormous challenges of economic development and growth facing us today, so that in our time we shall see the back of mass poverty in our country.

For I will tell you this: The mass poverty of our country has bred, and is breeding, a massed army of our people for whom hope in life is either dead or is dying. And from them a seething bitterness with far more dangerous implications for the future than anything else we have witnessed in the past.

Yes, the vision of positive change has a role in channelling this bitterness into rekindled hope for social and economic justice. Yes, the vision of positive change has the attractive promise of putting both the injustice of the past and the justice of the future on the same priority of work towards our constitutional rights to equal life chances for all. A kind of rough justice that the National Reconciliation Commission in its proposed narrow form is incapable of achieving.

Its exclusive focus on the assumed injustice of the past is at the expense of the justice of the future that positive action promises to deliver to our hard-pressed people.

A Peace and Settlement package will put both sides of the problem on an equal footing, so that it becomes a major condition for the success of positive change as a vision.