When I was learning the First Principles of British Parliamentary Debate and other theories one needed to arm himself with in the debate circles, one of the things I learnt about democracy that has stuck with me up to this day is the foundational principles of democracy which are; Participation, Representation and Accountability. In simple terms Participation means the populace getting involved in democratic processes through voicing out their thoughts, standing and fighting for their rights, voting (in elections or referendums), Representation here means choosing someone to represent the dreams, aspirations and thoughts of a people in a particular locations (in the case of Ghana, a constituency) and Accountability is our representatives at the national assembly (parliament) giving accounts of how well they represented the people that sent them to the national assembly. In our country, we are very good at participating through elections to choose our leaders, but what lacks most at times is our will to hold our leaders accountable for their actions.
In as much as, election is the hawking of ideas of how best to develop a nation or a constituency, a little misunderstanding or fracas here or there is normally unavoidable due to the clash of ideas and most at time when these clashes are more of an intellectual one it helps electorates in discerning the best of these ideas, but when these misunderstandings escalates to the point people losing their lives, deformed or properties getting destroyed then it is not worth the election. Post electoral conflict and her cousin of winner takes all are gradually seeping themselves into our electoral culture and if it is not grabbed by the horns one day it will turn sour on the tongue of our elections. In April 2017, when the clock chimed to mark the first term of the Akuffo-Addo presidency, 13 Delta Force members were arraigned before the Asokwa Circuit Court and were remanded into police custody. But, that didn’t happen because, their colleague Delta Force members stormed the court and aided in their escape in a show of brute force that the presiding judge’s life was spared by the timely intervention of the police who escorted her to her chambers. After this attack on the independence on the independence of the judiciary and calls for the disbandment of such groups within our political parties showed their foreheads in our conversations the then Minister for National Security gave the following response “there are no legally registered vigilante groups in this country and for that matter there are no such groups to be disbanded…” then again, President Akuffo-Addo commenting on the matter said “there are few things, Delta (Force) and other issues that are unpleasant, but working to deal with those issues to ensure peace and understanding in Kumasi, Ashanti Region, and the whole country.” The perpetrators were dealt with, each of the 13 suspects were fined Ȼ1,800 and signed a bond of good behaviour for 12 months, as the 8 who stormed the court to release the suspects had their charges against them dropped for lack of evidence. And the aftermath of this was a repeat of the taking over and sieging of government institutions when the NDC won the 2024 general elections.
Talking about elections, as I type this piece, the Ablekuma North election rerun is underway for some 19 polling stations where around 6,839 voters will decide the member of parliament for the constituency. But what baffles me most is the silence of both the previous and current governments, the Electoral Commission, the NPP and NDC, GES, and all other stakeholders on the Kwashieman Cluster of Schools fire incident. It has been a little over six months when the school was engulfed in a fire that destroyed six classrooms, a state-of-the-art computer and science labs and a library. The building was used to store electoral material of the disputed 7th December, 2024 elections, the fire broke out, after the Electoral Commission made an unpardonable mistake to reverse its decision of declaring Ewurabena Aubynn as the winner of the parliamentary elections. I say unpardonable because the Electoral Commission cannot just go about reversing its decisions knowing very well sensitive position they hold in the country, which is to say they should be sure of their results before making it public.
Today, we will have a winner and maybe a worthy opponent, but those who lost without partaking in the elections are the innocent students whose classrooms are a pile of wreckages holding on to the promise of a better future through education which is now a charred dream, burnt beyond recognition. The Kwashieman Cluster of Schools wasn’t just a cram of a Methodist and Anglican basic schools, it was both the cradle and beacon of education in Ablekuma North, the science lab didn’t serve only the Kwashieman cluster of schools but also its service was extended to other school beyond the walls of the school. I write about the Kwashieman Cluster of Schools because when people were heralding the rerun of the elections no one called for the restoration of the burnt school building, after months of the destructed building standing as a monument of how we fail ourselves as a country, stakeholders, government agents, engineers and technocrats have been around but not even a brush of “akaadoo” have been smeared on the walls, again, the longer the building stays unattended to the greater the risk of it collapsing to cause another tragedy. The fire didn’t only destroy a school building, but affected the flow of teaching and learning as the school was forced to run shift, it torched the dreams of these innocent students caught in the crossfire of this political rigmarole, it laid to waste the investment of Deloitte in gifting this edifice to the Ablekuma North Constituency, it tells any would be investor in our already underserved education sector that their investments can just be turned into a pile of wreckages and nothing will be done about it, it is also an attack on the dream of every student in the country, and oh it almost engulfed the “Agoro Apata” (the Play Shed) a play and learning shed gifted to the school by a philanthropist who believes in education through learning and resources had to be mobilized to put it in good shape for students.
A call for a rerun of the elections without bringing the plight of the schools to the fore shows where our focus is as a nation, especially when almost all the political bigwigs with presidential ambitions are donating cash and other resources to help their candidates secure the Ablekuma North seat, and it is a stain on our cloth. But, how will people know the plight of teachers and students if parents whose wards were direct beneficiaries of the services of the resource centre are moving about unconcerned and teachers are part of a silence culture? By daybreak we will know the winner of the elections, but these students whose dream have been fished out of their reach will never know when their beautiful school building will be restored to aid teaching and learning, sadly, these parents whose wards have their dreams gutted by fire will throng the streets of Ablekuma North to celebrate the outcome of that which has cost the dreams of their wards, and we as a nation will go about our duties like nothing ever happened. In the end some unscrupulous party fanatics will be emboldened by the unfolding of events at the Kwashieman Cluster of Schools and will repeat it somewhere in the country in the ever so close future as it was done in parts of the country when we clocked in the second part of the Mahama administration, because we are gradually perfecting the art of participating in democracy through post electoral violence and the accounts we leave behind are the trails of properties we lay to waste..
Koffi Adu Flair Demigod
11/07/25
