I was on board a commercial minibus (called Trotro in Ghana) to school and found myself uncomfortably sandwiched between two elderly men who had bought the Daily Graphic newspaper and were poring over its contents, while intermittently exchanging views about the news items they were reading.
The exceptionally heavy vehicular traffic in the capital that morning, coupled with the characteristic discomfort of boarding those rickety commercial minibuses, made me sore angry with everything and everyone around me- including these two men who would not stop disturbing the rest of us with their political views.
“Every politician, by default, is corrupt or latently corrupt. Irrespective of where they are located on earth, once they are seeking to be elected to a competitive political office, they begin to scheme, plot and join the dots to achieve political power,” the man on my right opined, simultaneously flipping to a new page of the newspaper he was reading.
“Why would you make such an assertion without any real and scientific proof? I mean why would you pass such a harsh judgment on all politicians anywhere on earth?,” the other man on my left reacted calmly, readjusting his bifocal lens on his face.
This is going to get interesting, I thought to myself.
“Scientific proof? Ouch!” he exclaimed, simultaneously folding the paper and fanning himself with it.
“Well, Mr. Mensah, the proof you are asking of me is already there in the social and scientific world. Maybe you are asking me whether my assertions about politicians have been corroborated by any scientific research process, huh? Have you ever wondered why the politician would spend a whopping US $ 10 million dollars waging a political campaign, knowing that he or she would earn less than US $ 300 dollars per annum?” the man asked his friend.
“Yeah….you have a point. The African politician is no more corrupt than his or her counterparts elsewhere on the globe,” Mr. Mensah added, virtually siding with his colleague.
“The politician receives money from corrupt leaders, business people etc. to run political campaigns to get elected to political offices; hoping to reward the former by propping them up in power and the latter by offering them juicy contracts.
“So the French President, Nicolas Sarkozy, takes money from the late Muamah Qathafi to wage his campaign to get elected to political office. No mean a person than the late Libyan president’s son accuses him of this,” the man explained.
By now I was enjoying the discourse and very much engrossed in the exchanges between the two men.
“The Italian Premier, Silvio Berlisconi is in court to defend himself against sexual, bribery and corruption scandals that are suffocating him. But these same western leaders find it convenient to equate African leaders to corruption and dictatorship!” Mr. Mensah observed, chuckling audibly.
The other man took off the lens from his face, and pointing it in Mr. Mensah’s direction, said with an obvious scorn, “The only difference between some of the corrupt African leaders and these equally corrupt western leaders is this: the African leader carries his ill-gotten money out of his country to an offshore bank in far away Switzerland because he fears that a succeeding government might go after him to probe him; whereas the western white-faced leader invests his corruption-stained money in his country, thereby creating jobs for his people.
“Take a closer look at the kind of politics Dmitry Medvedev and Vladmir Putin are playing in Russia. Let that kind of politics happen anywhere in Africa, and the entire continent of 54 countries would be tagged negatively and a full-scale fire power deployed against it,” the old man remarked, putting his lens back on his face.
“Have you read the latest Corruption Perception Index report of Transparency International? The 2010 report shows that Ghana(4.1), Cape Verde (5.1), South Africa(4.5), Tunisia(4.3) and Rwanda(4.0) have all performed better than Italy which scored 3.9 on a scale of 0-10.” Mr. Mensah added.
I got to my destination and rather reluctantly, had to alight from the vehicle. The lesson was very clear: Africa is not totally a bad case; it is a matter of who is telling the African story.
By: Ike W. Bikor
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