Benjamin Joe Danso: Waving the banner of neutrality when convenient

Before I begin this foray into the murky waters of public controversy, let me issue this disclaimer: this is not in any way a value judgment on any public appointment, now or at any time in the past. It is, rather, a contribution to the larger discussion of how suspicious we are of each other as a people. Now, with that out of the way, I shall proceed to the substantive issue and the core message of this epistle. A few weeks ago, the President swore in two new Deputy Chairpersons of the Electoral Commission (EC). As with almost every appointment to a ‘sensitive’ state institution, the news was greeted with jubilation or lamentation, depending on which side of the divide you stand. Those of us who feel no need to pick a side watched from the fence, weighing whose argument held up. Amid the accusations and counter-accusations, one word was waved at us again and again: ‘neutrality’. One camp insisted the EC needed a neutral umpire while the other insisted the appointees were as neutral as anyone could be. My take, and here comes the shocker, is that no one above the age of five can truly be described as neutral. To call a grown adult neutral is to discount everything that nature, nurture and socialisation have made of them. What we can and must demand of those we place in sensitive state institutions is objectivity, the discipline of being fair-minded in the face of the facts. Think about it for a moment. A child is born into a particular home, in a particular town, speaking a particular language. Before she can spell her own name, she has absorbed which radio station plays in the kitchen every morning, which politician makes her father raise his voice, and whose posters her grandmother tears down at election time. By the time she starts school, the dust of opinion has already begun to settle on her. Add to that the church or mosque, the secondary school, the university hall, the workplace, the WhatsApp groups, the funerals where politics is argued over jollof, and you have an adult who is a walking archive of preferences, loyalties and convictions. Now fast-forward to the moment such a person, at forty-five or fifty-five, is nominated to a high public office. By then, they have voted in several elections. They have opinions on the economy, on ‘galamsey’, on which government built which road. To demand that this person be ‘neutral’ is to demand that they be a blank slate, and that is simply not how human beings work. Let me go further. If we ever found a fifty-year-old citizen with no opinion whatsoever on the affairs of this nation, should we really trust them to manage its elections? Such a person is either not being truthful with us or has been so disengaged from national life that they hardly qualify for the job. Neither option inspires confidence. This is why the distinction between neutrality and objectivity matters. Neutrality is a state of being; objectivity is a discipline of doing. Neutrality concerns what is in your head and heart, which no one can audit. Objectivity concerns what you do with the evidence placed before you, which everyone can scrutinise. One is an impossible claim about a person’s inner life; the other is a measurable standard of public conduct. Consider the football referee. Many referees grew up supporting a club. Some may still quietly celebrate when their team wins on a Sunday. We do not, and cannot, demand that they erase that boyhood love. What we demand is that when a defender clips an attacker in the box, the whistle goes, no matter whose shirt either player is wearing. The referee is not judged by the club he supported as a boy; he is judged by the penalties he awards and refuses on the day. Or consider our judges. The judicial oath, in many Commonwealth traditions including ours, requires a judge to do right ‘without fear or favour, affection or ill-will’. Read those words carefully. The oath does not pretend that judges have no affections or ill-will. It assumes they do. It simply demands that, in the discharge of their duties, those affections be set aside. That is objectivity in a sentence, and it is a far more honest standard than the fiction of neutrality. Which brings me to the title of this piece. If you have watched our politics long enough, you will notice something curious about the banner of neutrality: it is raised and lowered depending on who holds the flagpole. When an appointee appears to lean towards the other side, neutrality becomes a sacred principle, invoked with the passion of a Sunday sermon. When the appointee appears to lean towards our side, the same principle suddenly becomes ‘unrealistic’, and we are reminded that ‘everyone has a background’. The party in opposition discovers neutrality; the party in power forgets it. Then the roles switch, and the script is read again with the actors swapping costumes. A standard that applies only to your opponents is not a standard at all. It is a tactic. The cost of this selective outrage is not small. It feeds the deep suspicion we hold of one another as a people. We have come to assume that every Ghanaian carries a party card stitched into the lining of their soul, and that no professional can ever rise above where they come from. When that assumption takes hold, no decision of any institution can ever be accepted on its merits. Every ruling is pre-judged by the perceived colours of the person who made it. The loser always cries foul, the winner always cries vindication, and the institution in the middle slowly bleeds credibility, whatever the actual quality of its work. So what should we demand instead? We should judge appointees by their conduct rather than their pedigree. Are their decisions transparent? Do they give reasons for what they do? Are they consistent, applying the same rule to the powerful and the powerless, to friend and foe? Are they willing to rule against the side they are presumed to favour when the facts demand it? Are they open to scrutiny and correction? These are questions we can actually answer, with evidence, over time. We must also strive build institutions that do not depend on saints. The genius of good institutional design is that it assumes people have leanings and builds guard-rails accordingly: party agents at every polling station, public collation of results, independent audits, clear rules on recusal, and courts that can review contested decisions. A well-designed system makes it difficult for any single official, however partisan their private heart, to tilt the outcome. That is a far safer bet than hoping we have found the one adult in the country without an opinion. And for those who accept these appointments, the burden of proof is heavier on you, and rightly so. In a society as suspicious as ours, it is not enough to be objective; you must be seen to be objective, every single day. That means explaining your decisions, stepping aside where your interests are genuinely conflicted, and resisting the temptation to reward those who cheered your appointment or punish those who opposed it. Let us, then, retire the word ‘neutral’ from our appointment debates. It promises something no human being can deliver and gives every side a convenient stick with which to beat the other. The better question to ask of anyone placed in a sensitive state institution is not ‘Where does this person come from?’ but ‘What does this person do with the facts before them?’ The first question will always divide us, because we all come from somewhere. The second can unite us, because the facts, when fairly weighed, belong to all of us. We will never find a referee who has never loved a team. We can, however, insist that the whistle blows the same way for everyone. That is the standard. Everything else is just a banner, waved when convenient. **** About the author: Benjamin Joe Danso is an Associate PR Director at Touchpoint Magna Carta. About the author; About the author: B. J Danso is an Associate PR Director at Touchpoint Magna Carta.