Election 2008: Prophets Collide with Reality
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.

 

By Kofi Akosah-Sarpong, September 6, 2008