The Ghanaian Journal

By Kofi Akosah-Sarpong

Despite its limitations globally, democracy as a system of governance, is
so far what has emerged globally as the best for humanity – it makes
practically all voices heard, minimize dictatorship, and as the Germans
will tell you, its by-product of decentralization, if properly instituted,
rapidly propel progress.

After years of confused one-party systems and threatening military juntas,
Africans are coming to the conclusion that democracy will serve them
better, as a development vehicle, more genuinely if blended with their
cultural values as other parts of the world have done, than all the hugely
foreign ideological governance systems they have uncritically gone through
over the past decades. But despite how democracy brings light and opens up
the development process, somehow in Ghana, which has been struggling to
consolidate democracy for the past 16 years, certain dark cultural
practices have been inhibiting it.

True to the fact that all democracies are eventually influenced by its
environment, in Ghana, prophets, traditional priests, juju-marabout
mediums and other spiritualists, as part of the Ghanaian milieu, are
swinging on the democratic scene big time, especially as the December 2008
general elections approaches. As Jean-Francois Bayart would say in The
State in Africa: The Politics of the Belly this is the “cocoa season” for
spiritualists of all spectrums to make dough from the emotionally helpless
politicians who consistently find it difficult to minimize such irrational
image and project higher rationalization of Ghana’s development reality
and challenges.

It is in this atmosphere that the Accra-based Ghanaian Observer reports
that “Barely three months into the December 2008 elections, finite mortals
are taking a peek into the unseen world of spirituality and fathoming the
mind of the Divine.
Most politicians, now admitting their finiteness, are therefore relying on
God for answers - some through fasting and prayers and others through
sacrifices to witchdoctors and other mediums.”

Swayed by the volume of politicians, some fronted by members of their
families, the normally apolitical spiritualists have been tainted by
politicians and their political leanings. The spiritualists have become
political and partisan, confusing the superstitious and the gullible.
Different spiritualists predict different victories for different parties,
most times based on money offered than genuine divination. I.K. Obeng,
clearly a political prophet, as he claims in his background of having
worked for military juntas to civilians governments, claims his
conversations with God indicate that the main opposition National
Democratic Party (NDC) will win convincingly in the upcoming December,
2008 general elections.

Earlier, the Accra-based Crusading Guide had reported that Sarfo Adu, a
Kumasi-based spiritualist, among other spiritualists, prophesized that
Nana Akufo-Addo, the presidential candidate of the ruling National
Patriotic Party (NPP), has being chosen by God to be the President of
Ghana from 2009 to 2016. Like Obeng and other spiritualists, Sarfo Adu
said he had foretold in the same manner about the incumbent President John
Kufour. In Ghana’s political spiritualists, there are different Gods, each
telling them different stories about who wins the December 2008 general
elections and in the process unsettling the democratic process.

Prophets like Obeng and Sarfo Adu, with their thorough grasp of the
spiritual psychology of Ghanaians and playing on Ghanaians superstitious
beliefs, blur the rationalization of reality and this implicates
negatively on Ghana’s development process. For the political
spiritualists, who experience the same developmental challenges as
ordinary Ghanaians, are not heard discussing the poor sanitation situation
or the worsening crime (some do assist the criminals spiritually) or
indiscipline or political violence or the deteriorating communal spirit
that has sustained Ghanaians since their ancestral times.

The issue is not to degrade the spiritualists, the trouble is how their
amazingly excessive influence on the Ghanaian life weakens rationalization
and reality of the development issues, so much so that even elites, like
Edward Mahama, Paa Kwesi Nduom, John Atta-Mills and Nana Akufo-Addo, who
are expected to radiate higher reasoning to illuminate the development
path, are under the heavy sway of the prophets, Voodoo priests, Malams,
juju-marabout mediums, witchdoctors, Shamans and other spiritualists to
the injury of Ghana’s larger progress.

The December 2008 general elections should do less with the spiritualists
and more with issues/reality on the ground, hard work, strategy, long-term
planning, commitment, steadfastness, and struggles, and not any unseen
forces manipulating Ghanaians to vote for John Atta-Mills, Edward Mahama,
Paa Kwesi Nduom or Nana Akufo-Addo simply because a God told a prophet.