Thursday, October 2, 2008

Letter to Aniket

Hey!

It’s hard to imagine that you’re at school and doing the ivy league thing while we’re roughing it in the back of tro tros and eating egg sandwiches and paw paw and, of course, still drinking those good old Stars.

I can’t believe that it’s been almost two months since you left -- we still comment when we pass your old hotel room or that smoothie place, and keep mentally jotting down election-related news and conversations for you. Speaking of, here’s a summary:

Basically, no one knows what will happen still, but everyone’s personal predictions are pretty interesting. Here are some of the extremes:
- We celebrated Eid ul-Fitr, the end of Ramadan, in Nima, a mainly Muslim urban slum community in Accra. After the main procession of chiefs and dancers passed, a throng of NDC supporters filled the street, decked out in red and green and white and sporting their umbrella-like logos.

[for everyone else, here's a summary of Ghanaian politics right now. The presidential elections are being held on December 7th, and there are two main parties competing for power. The first is the NPP, New Patriotic Party. They're the incumbent party and were the first democratially elected party to peacefully gain power in 2000. Since then, there's only been one other democratic election, in 2004, so this year is pretty historic. The other party, the NDC, or National Democratic Congress, began as a military party under the leadership of J. Rawlings. They were the party in control before the NPP was voted in. ]


Then one of the Parliamentary candidates and Vice Presidential candidate Alhaji Aliu Mahama drove by, waving at the impassioned crowds. It was the first time I’ve felt the power of a crowd like this… more than just being a political rally, this group of people were unified by another common identity – their religion. Maybe because of the stories I’ve heard about religion and politics from Mumbai, or for whatever other reason, I felt that there was a lot of latent power in this group because they were united by more than just politics. Or, politics had become about and a part of a larger identity. Which, I guess, can be true everywhere. It was just so tangible in this moment.
- Over dinner that night with my friend, we slipped into a conversation about the election. He said “if the NDC doesn’t win, then the NPP will have used tricks and there will be a civil war.” We asked him more about it, but he was adamant that the NPP couldn’t win legitimately (the registrar of voters is NPP, he claimed). He was equally confident in the succession of events, repeating that if the NPP won, there would be civil war. Just one perspective, but I do respect this man a lot, so it was interesting to hear this position from him.
- Another night, becks and I got a taxi ride home and had the back and forth Obama-McCain, Akufo-Addo Mills conversation. He said he was definitely for the NPP, and when we asked why, his answer was also suprising. “Because the NDC killed my family. I will never vote for them and they will never be good. They killed my uncle.”
- Last night, the boy our roommate has been talking to was chatting politics, and his opinion is that neither government is good, so he’s trying to make his vote strategic. He’s considering voting for the CPP (Convention People’s Party) and when I asked him why, wasn’t that like voting against the NPP (which he really doesn’t want) he responded “Yes, maybe. But I want to contribute to building up the CPP for future elections.”
- We have a friend who was coordinating a walk for peaceful elections event, and who helped make “Survive Elections 08” shirts. What a different frame of reference – in the US our shirts are about how ‘cool’ it is to vote, and here at least a few people are worried about making it through them as a peaceful country.
- On the radio today, I heard an announcement about the voter registration verification program that is going to help in the first week of October at all police stations. The announcer said that it was set up in an effort to correct the voter registration inaccuracies from August’s registration, and encouraged everyone to confirm that their name and photo were there correctly. Also, he warned that all minors and illegible voters could use this a grace period to cross their names off and avoid facing fines and punishment later. Finally, he instructed all families to remove their dead relatives from the registry.

Anyway, let us know if you have any specific on the ground questions about how things are going.