Educate Foot Soldiers: Panelists

Panelists at a two-day national conference on “Managing Foot soldiers and Party Loyalists for a sustainable democracy and effective institutional development” have called for the education of foot soldiers to desist from using violence as a means to attain their goals.

The panelists included Professor Ken Agyeman Attafuah, a lawyer, Dr. Emmanuel Akwetey of the Institute of Democratic Governance and Mr. Andrew Awuni, Executive Director of the Centre for Freedom and Accuracy, a civil society organisation.

Prof. Attafuah said foot soldiers should be educated to refrain from the thinking that coming to power “is the time to fill our bellies and the potholes that developed during the lean years in opposition” and change their ingrained mindset about the appropriation of national resources when in power.

He was of the view that foot soldiers of the National Democratic Congress and those of the New Patriotic Party should include “democracy” and “patriotism” respectively as tenets in their parties. Prof. Attafuah said the phrase “foot soldiers” evoked images of mercenaries, who were always after profit and pleasure.
It was in that direction that he suggested that foot soldiers should be educated to imbibe and “promote leadership for service and not avarice” and “for the greater common good and not the narrow partisan or sectarian good.”

He also called on those in government to promote transparency in public procurement ventures which had been the source of some misunderstanding, a major cause of the uprising of foot soldiers. To solve that problem, Prof. Attafuah called for the strengthening of national anti-corruption institutions to enable them to perform their functions more effectively.

He suggested that the Commission on Human Rights and Administrative Justice (CHRAJ) should be given the necessary resources to be made the sole anti corruption fighting body in the country as there was “too much overlapping leading to inefficiency” in the fight against corruption. The measure, he hoped, would prevent “the current forum shopping” of anti corruption institutions whenever an issue arose.
He was optimistic that CHRAJ could do that work more efficiently since the latest Afrobarometre study indicated that it was the most trusted and effective anti corruption body. “This will allow for effective resource allocation and will be in consonance with emerging international best practices.” He added that Ghana could do it because Kenya, Hong Kong and Sierra Leone had succeeded in that regard.

Dr. Akwetey, for his part, was of the view that both foot soldiers and party loyalists were an integral part of the political structure who should be properly educated to contribute meaningfully towards the nation’s democratic development.

“There is a whole lot we have to do to transform them. There is a whole democracy education which is not on the table.” “They should therefore be educated to know that politics is not only about self-aggrandizement.” According to Dr. Akwetey, foot soldiers sometimes behaved in certain ways because “they have rights that have not been respected, they have rights that have not been honoured.

We are intolerant as a society and the foot soldiers exemplify this.”
He called on politicians to build the capacities of their foot soldiers to enable them to take up the right positions whenever the need arose. Nana Dr. S.K.B Asante, the Omanhene of Asante Asokore, who chaired the programme, said many presidents in a democratic system had faced the challenge of foot soldiers. He called on all to consider the problem of foot soldiers more realistically as it went beyond “narrow partisan concerns.”

Mr. Awuni, whose organisation convened the conference, said the issue of foot soldiers stemmed from a “conquest mentality in the sharing of spoils.” In his view, since foot soldiers were always part of the nation’s political culture, there was the need to handle their concerns well. “The phenomenon of foot soldiers is an organizational development of parties which shows structural defects in the organization,” he said.

Mr. Awuni cautioned opposition politicians not to be complacent about what was happening as “other parties’ foot soldiers are busily taking notes to be used later when their parties come to power.”

Source: D-G