Bangkok fight

Bangkok, Thailand may be the world's capital of 'smiles' but it's no smiling business at the climate change negotiations here. It's another big bare knuckle fight over the future of the earth.

Yours truly heading into the climate talks in the world's capital of 'smiles' - Bangkok

Parties, mainly Annex I (rich countries) have clashed with non-Annex I Parties (developing countries) yet again. Negotiating parties are split down the middle pretty much on every single substantive issue at the informal inter-sessional on climate change underway in Bangkok, Thailand. It's more than a fight over agenda and/or process. It's really about the future of the planet, how to save it from possible meltdown. 

Rich countries want two of the three negotiating tracks terminated at the end of 2012 in Doha, at COP 18, but developing countries which stand to lose the most from an overheating planet, think and rightly so, that the work streams of these two tracks (AWG-KP and AWG-LCA) under the Bali Action Plan have yet to be completed and therefore can and should only be closed when they have delivered on their mandates as per the Climate Convention. The third and newest work stream is the AWG-ADP (Durban decision).

Shutting down the work of the AWG-KP and the AWG-LCA at this stage will effectively leave rich countries off the hook to jump ship (to the AWG-ADP) without actually honouring their prior international commitments under these two tracks. And the big question is what will be the guarantee that any agreements reached under the Durban mandate in future will be honoured by wealthy countries given their failure, morally and legally, to do what they pledged to undertake under the two older negotiating tracks. So, this fight is about trust as much as it is about substance.

Ghana’s new veep

Ghana has a new vice president. Paa Kwesi Amissah-Arthur was vetted by Parliament and sworn-in on Monday, August 6. His appointment was necessitated by the accession of John Mahama as president of Ghana following the sudden death of President John Atta Mills on July 24, 2012.

Amissah-Arthur

 

Until his new appointment, Amissah-Arthur, 61, a former deputy minister of finance, was the governor of the central bank, the Bank of Ghana, (BoG). Forget about the fact that he’s not a charismatic person. Ghanaians have now gotten used to having non-charismatic leaders.

His appointment has generated mixed reaction from within the ruling NDC party. I think the larger Ghanaian public is quite unsure about what he brings to the table albeit he has played critical roles in crafting the country’s economic path over the better part of the last three decades. He spent about half of his entire working life at the Ministry of Finance.

Perhaps what Ghanaians can relate to most is his last posting as governor of the BoG. Amissah-Arther’s tenure at the BoG has seen the national currency, the Cedi, decline sharply against nearly all major trading currencies especially since the beginning of 2012.

Generally, the national currency has tended to come under severe pressure in an election year as this. And so there’s probably nothing new in the latest decline. What is new however is that the person who presided over this decline is now the vice president and the de facto head of the government’s Economic Management Team. A case of more of the same? It could be but not necessarily.

How this plays in the campaigns leading to the December 7, 2012 elections remains to be seen.

Mahama and Amissah-Arthur will serve out what remains of President John Atta Mills’ mandate. They will get the nod of the ruling party in September to contest the December polls together as the party’s presidential candidate(s).

President Mills’s departure, the orderly transition and impending presidential and parliamentary elections in December have focused minds on the health of Ghana’s democracy. The country has made some remarkable progress on the democratic path as exemplified by the 2008 elections, transfer of power and the smooth process leading to the assumption of office by a new president following the sudden death of Mills.

However Ghana’s democratic governance is beset with some deep-seated political problems. The policy making process is heavily centralized and the executive president is extremely powerful, too powerful for the good of the country. The system has also bred a strong party loyalty. The system of political patronage is neo-patrimonial, akin to single party form of governance. Equally debilitating is the weak institutional capacity at both the regulatory and political levels.

I will tackle some of these in a later blog.