Professor Vladimir Antwi-Danso, the Dean of the Ghana Armed Forces Command and Staff College, has tasked the citizenry to continuously work towards consolidating democratic gains of the country.
He averred that democracy should be seen as processes and not an event and with that state of mind and outlook, institutions must be built to support, assist and strengthen the democratic dispensation.
“Democracy is a process where gradually you build your institutions, gradually you make changes suiting your socio-historical and cultural specificities and not copy the democracies of the western world which will not be appropriate for the nation,” Prof. Antwi-Danso stressed.
Speaking at a forum organised by the Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA) in Accra on ‘Building democratic institutions’, he explained that the socio-historical, cultural and values trajectories the nation had ascribed to were changing democracy gradually due to the establishment of an Electoral Commission (EC) and the Inter Party Advisory Committee (IPAC).
Prof. Antwi-Danso insisted that such institutions were unique and their mode of operation could not be found anywhere in the world and Ghanaians must be proud of their adaptation and adoption that must not be taken for granted.
According to him, Ghanaians had adopted and adapted their own democratic dispensation and cautioned that thinking of democracy as periodic voting and changing of governments was myopic because ballots did not necessarily stop bullets and democracy was not static but evolving.
“You have all that but the coups happen so indeed the ballot does not stop the bullet. Never think that the ballot can stop the bullet since you can have your ballot, if it is not credible, transparent, free and fair and you accept it, the bullet can come at you and the most recent coup in Africa happened in early September in Guinea when an elite force overthrew the government of President Alpha Conde, barely a year after he was re-elected in a controversial third term vote,” Prof. Antwi-Danso warned. –ghanaweb.com
