MAHAMA: He Can Come Back But Not For Eight Years

President John Dramani Mahama

By Ekow Mensah

President John Dramani Mahama can most certainly bounce back to power in 2020 but he can only serve for one term.

This is contrary to some public speculation that because he has not served two consecutive terms, he can run for another two terms of four years each.

The fact is that article 66 clauses I to 4 of the 1992 constitution on the term of office of the President does not make reference to “consecutive” terms.

Article 66(2) of the constitution stipulates that “A person shall not be elected to hold office as President of Ghana for more than two terms.

From the strict interpretation of this clause President Mahama can only serve one additional term as President if he wins the 2020 election.

This fact would greatly influence the decision of the President and the National Democratic Congress (NDC) about whether or not he will contest the 2020 elections.

The question is, will the NDC put up a candidate who can only serve one term and why?

Already, it appears that several leading members of the NDC are lacing their boots to join the contest for the presidential candidature of the party.

 It is still not clear if President Mahama will like to throw his hat into the ring.

Editorial

FAREWELL TO A FRIEND

On January 7, 2017 President John Dramani Mahama will have to step down from office and play a new role as a former leader of Osagyefo Dr Kwame Nkrumah’s Ghana.

How well he did as a leader is still a subject of intense debate and we have no interest in doing what future generations can do better.

No matter what his circumstances are today, President Mahama was a significant part of our movement and our friend.

He was a part of the Palestine Solidarity Campaign and joined the struggle to end the illegal blockade of Cuba and free the Cuban Five.

He also provided tremendous support which enabled Ghana to host the 8th Pan African Congress in Accra.

As was to be expected many comrades including those of us who work on The Insight disagreed with some of the actions and policies of his administration.

We opposed the attempt to privatize the Electricity Company of Ghana (ECG), the Economic Partnership Agreement (EPA) with the European Union, the granting of asylum to the GITMO 2, references to Hezbollah as a terrorist organisation and the embarkation on the path of general neo-liberalism.

Our opposition was principled and we cannot have regrets.

As the days draw near for President Mahama to exit the Flagstaff House, we can only wish him well in his future endeavours and hope that he has learnt his most important lessons.

Our lesson is that it is only leaders who remain absolutely faithful to the masses all the time who can count on their support all the time.

Palestinian Lives Matter And Not Just When They Are Lost

Palestinians wait to cross an Israeli army checkpoint

By Tony Abbott 

The sun sets on the Israel-Gaza border January 4, 2009. 

Palestine has never been the same since the 1917 Balfour Declaration, by which the British government allowed “the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people,” with daily violence highlighted when the plight of Palestinians living under the Israeli occupation is referred to in recent history.

Daily reports of violence, however, should not make the disturbing aspects of normal life under the Zionists' occupation seem any less important.

From minor attacks on Palestinian residents in different parts of the country to several full-scale wars, killing and injuring civilians is part and parcel of the nation’s contemporary narrative.

In its latest aggression on Gaza Strip alone, the Israeli regime forces claimed the lives of nearly 2,200 Palestinians, including 577 children, according to the United Nations figures.

Apart from all-out wars, violence in individual incidents under the Israeli rule is a part of the Palestinian people’s daily life, with hundreds of cases registered every year, frequently blamed on Palestinians by Tel Aviv.

Human lives matter or at least that is what we are made to believe in by taking a look at news websites, most of which are replete with reports of human fatalities over various reasons.

As sensitive intelligent creatures, we humans associate ourselves with the victims, imagine ourselves in the shoes of an assailant, and judge; our hearts could go out to those having lost their loved ones while we could feel outraged at the perpetrator.

This is all common and part of who we are as humans, capable of empathy, a feature that could also be used in the world of media to manipulate us.

In the case of the Palestinians’ sufferings, sound judgment makes any human being feel sorry to some extent for those falling victim to Israeli crimes no matter how it happened, shot dead by a single heavily-militarized soldier, starved nearly to death to make a voice heard, or made homeless by the regime’s bulldozers.

The plight of Palestinians, however, far surpasses the violence mostly highlighted by human rights and Islamic outlets while sporadically reported by the Western media.

Daily life under occupation has yielded a whole lot of troubles for the Palestinian people, which they have to deal with on a daily basis, while their sufferings going under-reported.

Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli Prime Minister who superintends over the gross violation of the rights of Palestinians 

Take water for example, a basic right and necessity for every living creature. The Zionist regime has limited the Muslim nation’s access to water resources, shrinking water consumption of people in the West Bank in 2014 to 21 liters less than the 100-liter minimum figure per capita per day, recommended by the World Health Organization (WHO).

The regime has also granted illegal Israeli settlers exclusive access to many water springs in Palestinian territories, making life a misery for farmers who depend on their crops for a living.

This is while the regime is making $300 million every year out of the European export of goods, produced by profitable enterprises set up in over 230 settlements, regarded illegal by the UN and most of the world countries.

The regime’s nearly 100 fixed checkpoints in the occupied West Bank are also put in place to insure that movement remains a grueling task for Palestinians on their own land.

On the other side of the spectrum, Tel Aviv does not spare any efforts to irritate Palestinians by depriving them of less immediate needs, for instance by not providing them with 3G Internet and keep their connectivity speed one of the slowest on earth.

However, decades of systematic crackdown by the occupying forces have taught Palestinian generations that resistance remains the sole method to nullify the regime’s inhumane tactics.

Many activists assert that it is time to pay more attention to resistance against the occupation of Palestine if the world is actually serious about ending the Israeli aggression in the region. 

“I believe that the most important thing is to understand that if we don't pay attention to these efforts, they are invisible, and it's as if they never happened,” said Brazilian documentary filmmaker Julia Bacha in a 2011 Ted Talk.

In her Talk, which followed eight years of documenting the situation in Palestine, Bacha recounts the story of the Palestinian town of Budrus, whose people managed to force the regime through peaceful means not to grab nearly half of their town for the sake of constructing the annexation wall as planned.

Israel's illegal move to construct a separation sparked outrage among Palestinian officials and residents as well as peace activists across the globe.

The Palestinians, however, mounted a 10-month protest to stop the wall from being built on their olive groves, which would have occupied 40 percent of their land and cut their access to the rest of the West Bank.

“Through inspired local leadership, they launched a peaceful resistance campaign to stop that from happening,” she says.

Bacha highlights the “the power of attention” to the Palestinian resistance, which would ultimately result in multiplication of nonviolent methods to bring about change for the Muslim people, whose lives matter and must not be lost.

“If they multiply, their influence will grow in the overall Israeli-Palestinian conflict. And theirs is the kind of influence that can finally unblock the situation. These leaders have proven that nonviolence works in places like Budrus. Let's give them attention so they can prove it works everywhere.”

This is Why Obama's Successor Needs to Look at the World From a Different Angle

Donald Trump, the next President of the USA

The next US administration will need to soberly reassess the results of Washington's decade-long foreign policy and find a healthy balance between the use-of-force approach and successful diplomacy, experts say, turning the spotlight on the US' deteriorating relations with Russia and China.

The next US administration will need to begin with a "sober evaluation" of the world as it is, rather than as the American president and the country's senior officials wish it to be, American foreign policy analysts Dimitri K. Simes, Pratik Chougule and Paul J. Saunders highlight in their article for The National Interest.

"US leaders will need to define vital national interests, with a realistic hierarchy of international priorities. They will need to review the extent to which current policies, including alliances, serve US interests. And they will need to establish clear objectives in relations with rival major powers China and Russia," US scholars noted.

"Then, and only then, will the next president be able to design policies that further both immediate needs and enduring strategic objectives," they stressed.

Among a number of crucial foreign policy issues, the scholars highlighted the deterioration in relations between the US and Russia, as well as between Washington and Beijing.

The analysts call attention to the fact that few policies have alarmed the Kremlin as much as NATO's expansion. "A bold move as this almost literally moved NATO to the suburbs of St. Petersburg, incorporating Estonia and Latvia into NATO was especially difficult for Moscow to stomach," the US foreign policy analysts pointed out, adding that the NATO expansion toward Russia's borders have prompted Moscow's suspicions that the bloc remained what it used to be during the Cold War-ear — an anti-Russia alliance.  

"Few recall that Vladimir Putin originally sought to make Russia a major part of a united Europe," the analysts reminded their readers.

Against this background, it is understandable why the Russian leadership is seeking to establish new alliances and to bolster the country's defenses, Simes, Chougule and Saunders remarked, adding that the recent collapse of the US-Russian agreement on Syria has added insult to injury.

On the other hand, the scholars continued, Russo-American tensions "are particularly troubling given how maladroitly Washington has approached its other major rival" — China. According to the analysts, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's approach toward Beijing to some extent contributed to the deterioration in bilateral relations between the US and China.

For its part, Obama's "Asian pivot" has further exacerbated the situation. "President Obama's 'pivot'-now known as 'rebalance'-to Asia lent further credence to Chinese concerns over a hostile US containment and regime-change policy," they emphasized, bemoaning the fact that under Obama "this pattern of needlessly provoking China has become the norm."

While the next administration will need to correct the US' foreign policy course there are certain obstacles in the way of strategic change. "If the next president pursues a new strategy, he or she should expect resistance from America's entrenched foreign-policy establishment… Recent fiascos from Iraq to Libya have been bipartisan affairs, and many will seek to defend their records.

Similarly, foreign-policy elites in both parties have internalized the notion that 'American exceptionalism' is a license to intervene in other countries and that 'universal aspirations' guarantee American success," US scholars warned. For his part, Philip Giraldi, a former counter-terrorism specialist and military intelligence officer of the United States Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), notes that the direction of the US foreign policy depends on who will occupy the While House following the November election. 

He draws attention to the fact that in contrast to Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton has repeatedly signaled that she will pursue a tougher policy toward Russia and China than her predecessor, Barack Obama, if elected. "Unfortunately, she [Hillary Clinton] would find little opposition in Congress and the media for an extremely risky foreign policy, and would benefit from the Washington group think that prevails over the alleged threats emanating from Russia, Iran, and China," Giraldi writes in his op-ed for The American Conservative.

In an interview with Svobodnaya Pressa, an independent Russian media outlet, Vladimir Bruter, an expert on foreign affairs with the International Institute of Humanitarian and Political Studies and the Valdai International Discussion Club, suggested that the US is unlikely to switch from the policy of diktat to the policy of dialogue in the near future.

The expert highlighted that the US still remains a military power second to none. At the same time, the US' concept of "American exceptionalism" is built on foundations of sand: the United States is a relatively young state; it has not always been a hegemon and won't maintain its global dominance forever. In light of this, Washington needs to reconcile itself with a new multi-polar reality and take other geopolitical players' interests into consideration.