This one has pricked my conscience for too long and I feel like I should have voiced it out earlier. We operate a governance system we don’t understand, or care not to understand. It’s by the comfort of an exploiter or group of exploiters who care not about the conditions of the compatriots or health of the motherland nation. Petty corruption is too deeply entrenched for anything effective to be done to halt it even though it slows down development for everyone without aid. We have development for some without aid while confining others to development on perpetual aid.
What I found more disturbing came from a conversation with a lawmaker. He, who co-holds Common Fund shares with his colleagues, appeared as frustrated with his own people as I were over some very small project that was supposed to be organized for my community. As a chief, I have control over small community assets against huge liabilities of deficit in social and economic capital needed to improve the living standards of my people.
I never thought that way, before. It didn’t click that the centripetal system of our indigenous governance, places the responsibility of the development of the community upon the community itself. We don’t take the resources of the paramountcy to develop its component communities. Each community is responsible for the progress of its own members. The centre (paramountcy) thrives when its units thrive; because when a chief sells a plot of land for example, one-third goes to the centre, the two-thirds get to be broken up into five parts.
One part of the five goes to the chief which he shares with his mother (the queen mother). Another one part goes to the individual or family which used to farm on the land for sustenance. Two parts go to the development of the community, the assets that are to be mobilized by the chief for common good. The last one-fifth is used to maintain the stool. This includes housing (stool house or palace) the stool) and acquiring stool regalia and paraphernalia. Accounting for this last part which is nne?mmabuo, is accounting for stool property; auditing and handing it over from one chief to another in succession.
Community asset, land, is defined in terms of mmoa nni nk?. The individual or family farms the surface of it and enjoys the proceeds of the labour. Anything above (timber) or below (mineral) is common property. So if you build a house or fixed property above your ‘own’ land, you pay property levy or tax. Of course, because humankind must eat, when the piece of land leased to you is acquired to exploit what is above (timber and building projects) or below (mining) it, you get compensated.
In my candid opinion, we are failing so miserably in incorporating this simple principle into our contemporary governance system. Our political scientists and governance experts have failed us big time. We need our natural chieftaincy arrangements as a basis for a constitution that enables the centre to draw its strength from the peripheral units. The centrifugal system is ruinous; it suffocates and exploits the resources of the periphery. Its elements of the centre to appropriate what belongs to everyone to themselves to the exclusion of all others.
Our indigenous system is an enabling and assuring framework for organizing development, is everywhere and for everyone. I fail to understand anytime I see pictures of schoolchildren lying on the floor or sitting on pieces of rock to write. I ask myself whether that community has a MMDCE, MP, Assemblyman, Unit Committee or a chief. If all these people are alive and present in a community like that, then the system is seriously malfunctioning in dysfunction.
The day I took my chiefly oath of office, the wise King advised that if my community prospers, I will prosper. So far, my community seems to be prospering; but personally, I am getting poorer. Perhaps I am a poor manager of the one part of the fifth that goes to the queen mother and myself plus the two parts allocated to community development. For example when I sold 10 plots to start building a palace, by the time I became aware, the people were constructing a public toilet with the proceeds. That was their priority. Someone please tell the King, I am yet to personally prosper after thirteen years.
As a motherland, we have almost worked ourselves into a ‘never again congress’ and ‘maybe ?sono’ choice situation. There’s no ‘for sure’ option. Masked in hypocrisy and contradiction, congress enacted a useless assets declaration law that promotes thievery and plundering of state resources for self. ?sono is ‘maybe’ because some among them have succumbed to congress’ modus operandi: ‘stealing state money is too easy; using same money to improve compatriots’ lives is too difficult.
By Kwasi Ansu-Kyeremeh