Ghana’s 2020 General Election Cleaner than 2020 US General Election? – Part 1

It took quite a considerably while – and here, we are referring to the latest 2022 United States of America’s periodic release of its Country-by-Country Report on Human Rights Practices around the world (See “[Full Text] US Department of State Releases 2022 Country Report on Human Rights Practices in Ghana” Modernghana.com 4/12/23). I don’t know the reason or reasons why the local Ghanaian media continues to be obsessively fixated with what the US State Department or its Ministry of Foreign Affairs thinks about the quality of the practice of human rights and the level and degree of the enforcement of laws and regulations pertaining to human rights among members of the various communities and sectors of the larger Ghanaian society of, presently, an estimated 35-million people.

We highlight or draw attention to the preceding observation because the level and quality of the enforcement of human rights laws right here in the United States of America definitely leaves much to be desired and, to be certain, has been this way for as long as anybody that yours truly knows can remember, especially with regard to the treatment of racial and ethnic minorities, although the situation has been steadily improving over the course of the nearly 40 years that this writer has been domiciled hereabouts, both as a legally documented Permanent Resident and, since 1993, as a Naturalized American Citizen with three American-born children, namely, two teenage sons and a young-adult daughter of a Nigerian custodial mother who declared herself to be a Transgender Male about a decade or so ago.

S/he is a college-educated realtor with a well-known real-estate firm in the New York Metropolitan Area. I am personally not actively involved in her life by choice because as I categorically informed the Judge of the New York City Family Court System – actually several of them a while back – the decision and choice of my daughter to become a Transgender Male was exclusively taken by her custodial mother and the primary subject or, properly speaking, the veritable victim of such an “unnatural process” of gender reassignment. Nevertheless, I am a fierce and vanguard defender of the inalienable and the inviolable human and civil rights of members of the LGBTQ+ Community and had been so long before the birth of my daughter nearly 26 years ago.

What I also want to highlight here is this rather peculiar or weird official attitude towards basic human rights issues right here in the United States of America. It is weird because many issues pertaining to the flagrant and even decidedly criminal treatment of racial and ethnic minorities are often routinely classified as “Civil Rights Matters,” the implication here being that American Society, being highly technologically advanced, is also, somehow, culturally so advanced as to take basic questions of human rights literally for granted. But, of course, we all know and are well aware of the fact that this façade is a patent falsehood, at the very best. Still, the United States of America, for good or bad, continues to be envisaged, largely by many countries of the so-called Third World, as a beacon of the emulative “pursuit” of civil and human rights in self-ascribed ways that cannot be credibly said of other equally technologically advanced countries right here in the Ideological West and elsewhere around the world.

Now, we have chosen to first look at what the United States’ Foreign Ministry or State Department, as it is popularly known and routinely or casually called hereabouts, has to say about the general conduct of Ghana’s 2020 General Election because it was hotly contested between the two largest and most significant political parties in the country, namely, the ruling New Patriotic Party (NPP), a pro-Western and neoliberal market-oriented ideological establishment, and the faux-socialist main opposition National Democratic Congress (NDC). Presently, like the Democratic Party (DP) of the United States of America, the social-intervention oriented New Patriotic Party, currently led by Ghana’s President Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo, is the relatively more popular of the country’s two major parties.

But it is the opposition National Democratic Congress that continues to hold a slightly higher edge in the strategically critical area of political propaganda, especially what Americans call the “Politics of Systematic Disinformation.” The good news here is that the communications operatives of the New Patriotic Party are fast catching up with their rivals and counterparts of the National Democratic Congress. Now, where the yawning gap remains to be remarkably closed or leveled up, as it were, is in the area of public relations, that is, the capacity of key NPP Communicators to effectively enlighten the overwhelming majority of Ghanaian voters and the citizenry about the light years of differences, policy wise, that exist between the far more progressive and visionary leadership of the New Patriotic Party and the latter’s largely self-serving and pathologically acquisitive opponents of the National Democratic Congress.

*Visit my blog at: KwameOkoampaAhoofeJr

By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., PhD
English Department, SUNY-Nassau
Garden City, New York
April 16, 2023
E-mail: [email protected]