Editorial: How it Confuses Some Elements can Shock

When we speak of principled stance, this is what it means.

If the two of us are in a contest and we made two separate promises on a single issue, if you win, it is your principles on the matter that I must hold you to.

For instance, if you say you will fight galamsey and I say I will allow galamsey and you win, it doesn’t matter what my position on the matter is. I must see you fighting galamsey because that was what you stood by.

You cannot expect me to applaud you if you fail to fight galamsey, the same way you would have every right to criticise me for fighting galamsey if I had won because that was not my position ahead of winning the contest over you.

It’s a battle of ideas and when you ideas win, I must hold you strictly to it.

This is how it works:

Perhaps, you would not have emerged victorious if you had promised otherwise. It is the reason for which you must be held to stand for what you stood for to win the contest.

Unfortunately, in our part of the world, it doesn’t work like that. People who have taken contrary principled positions, are expected to be measured by the principles of those they stood counter to.

If a discussion brings both divergent principles on the table, it would suffice to suggest that each of the principled stance would advance arguments to support why they think so.

To proceed to tell me that somebody said he would allow galamsey when President Akufo-Addo promised to end it and for that matter winning elections, and to tell me that I cannot ask of him what he promised to stop, I may need words to describe you.

We are just something else.

Source: ASK