“We’ll Fish Out MP Mole and Punish the Person”: Language, Politics, and Culture of Deceit in Ghana’s Politics

Abstract

Africa’s postcolonial politics is a complex replica of its colonial governance system. Both regimes incorporate the use of language to enhance political deceit. With language as key in communication, the political elites use political deceit to routinise power against the ruled. In this chapter, I deploy interdisciplinary perspective to analyse how Ghana’s political elites leverage language to deceive the ruled. Arguing that postcolonial deceit is not a novelty, I reach back to the early days of Ghana’s independence to show how the earliest political elites were involved in the politics of counter-betrayals, informed by the deceptive use of language. Against this historical context, I discuss two recent unprecedented political events, indexed by the election of an opposition MP as Ghana’s Speaker of Parliament and Parliament’s approval of government’s nominees, all against the wishes of the opposing side of the country’s duo-political system. In all this, I argue that political deceit is a failure of the elites to negotiate between their use of power and the freedom of the ruled. Thus, the main question driving my chapter is: How does language enhance political deceit in Ghana? I will conclude on providing the nexus between the use of language to promise and political deceit.