Divided by Party, United in Suffering: Ghana’s dilemma of blind partisan loyalty

There is something deeply troubling about the way politics has come to occupy Ghana’s public space. Every morning, from television and radio programmes to conversations in taxis, offices and homes, we encounter the same political theatre. The government of the day says one thing, the opposition holds press conference to say another, their supporters then rush to defend, accuse and counter-accuse one another over who has mismanaged the country more. And somewhere in the middle of all this noise is the ordinary citizen, struggling with unemployment, rising living costs, inadequate public services and the daily uncertainty of making ends meet. The concern is not simply that Ghana is politically divided.

It is that partisan loyalty increasingly shapes our understanding of right and wrong, our tolerance for poor governance and our willingness to demand accountability from those entrusted with public office. This is where I juxtapose Karl Marx’s famous description of religion as the “opium of the masses” to offer an interesting lens through which to examine Ghanaian partisan politics. Marx, the German philosopher and economist, used opium as a metaphor for something that provides comfort amid suffering while potentially distracting people from the conditions responsible for that suffering. The argument was not merely that religion was harmful, but that it could through its teachings make suffering more bearable without necessarily changing its underlying causes. A similar argument can be made about partisan politics and the particular version of democracy we practice here in Ghana. It is no doubt that political parties (the NDC and the NPP) are essential to representative democracy. They represent competing ideas, offer alternatives to voters, mobilise citizens and create…