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I was on a creaky �trotro� en-route an inter-city and town transport terminal to get out of Accra, Ghana�s capital. That was July 31, 2014. I was attending a workshop, under the aegis of the Institute for Democratic Governance (IDEG). �Trotro� is an intra-city commuter vehicle, considered cheap, and patronised by the mass of Ghanaians. I sat clutching to the seat in front to lessen the impact of jostling from the jerks of movement in a crazy traffic. My eyes moved from face to face, thinking, which of them was carrying cholera or the Ebola viral disease. Then an argument broke out to jostle me out of my thoughts. It was heated, very heated and it was about the �suffering in Ghana�. Spiraling prices, poor governance, corruption, low wages, under employment and unemployment and also rising crime. It continued for some time, even as commuters got down and others joined. The argument was sometimes bipolar, split on political party lines. That is the ruling National Democratic Congress (NDC) and the main opposition New Patriotic Party (NPP). Then a rather effeminate man joined the minibus at one of the stops to change the trend. He spoke with a shrill up tone voice. He chastised Ghanaian politicians as thieving, insensitive, un-focused and greedy. For him, the effeminate man, all the supposed elected regimes from Nkrumah to Mahama served the interest of selected few, cronies and lackeys. He went on to talk about how the regimes �created money bags� and flaunted their riches in properties as the majority looked on petrified. Then came a murmur of dissent, who referred to the Single Spine Salary goodies as prove of better times. The effeminate man cut in even before the dissenting voice could finish, �enough is enough, we need a coup, yes, coup! Almost all passengers seemed to concur A woman in the front was the loudest supporter of the coup idea, �for we are suffering too much�. As we got down at the terminal, a girl about 18, face heavily daubed with makeup, soliloquised behind me; �what is a coup�? Perhaps a coup in Ghana now would be popular, perhaps not. But it would be utterly unnecessary and downright retrogressive. Besides, it would be unlawful as Ghana is signatory to Sub-regional, Regional and International statutes that subscribe it to democratic governance. That entails governments could only be changed by credible elections. Specifically one objective of the African Charter is to �promote adherence by each State Party to the universal values and principles of democracy and respect for human rights�. This is premised upon the respect for the Rule of law, respect for, and the supremacy of the Constitution and constitutional order. Ghana has experienced at least four putsches since independence in 1957; 1966, 1972, 1979 and 1981. There were many other attempted plots. On July 5, 1978, there was a change over from Supreme Military Council (SMC) 1 to SMC 2, when General Ignatius Kutu Acheampong, Head of SMC 1 was replaced by Lieutenant-General Fred Akuffo as Chairman of SMC 2. That was referred to by analysts as a Palace Coup All the junta leaders claimed their actions were because of corruption, misrule, dictatorship, inequity, pomposity of the ruling class and general dissatisfaction, as a result of economic hardships. That was why the juntas had names such as National Liberation Council, National Redemption Council and the Provisional National Defence Committee. We have had putsches coming as revolutions, whose leaders professed to fix the socially and economically topsy-turvy Ghana, but to no avail. Ghana has been running a multi-party system since 1992. There had been six elections. Power had changed hands too, from one party to the other successfully. The last election results were contested in court and our democracy, hailed all over the world is thriving, yet political disaffection is gnawing at Ghana unnoticed, pandered by the now established bi-polar politics that splits the nation essentially on sentiments. As Ghanaians bicker with venom on serious issues of development from parochial lenses, other countries Ghana is at par with in development half a century ago have gone past and galloping away. It appears going by the nation�s own rule (constitution) and popular international charters, Ghana cannot extricate itself now from the multi-party democracy it has chosen and operated since 1992. If Ghana did, it could face international sanctions and be locally embroiled in factional turmoil. So what do we do? Let the system of government we have now work. We should find the flaws and work on them. We have a written constitution. Some other nations run on a package that partly evolved but they are moving on. IDEG believes, Mistrust and Fragile Consensus is the Bane of Ghanaian Politics,� and is pushing for reforms. The organisation�s document: �Why Multi-Party Governance Reforms gave a prognosis of the situation in Ghana, clearly, succinctly and perhaps prophetically. Yes indeed �democratic politics is premised on the necessity of difference-on diversity and contestation of ideas among the different groups that constitute the political community,� says the IDEG document. It said: �The competition among the diverse groups and their ideas occurs as part of a dialectical process, which resolves itself in a new consensus. �In particular the amicable resolution of the conflict or competition in a form that ensures the coherence of the community is necessary to guarantee the stability and sustainability of the political community.� The dynamics of contest of ideas to spur development perhaps is missing in the Ghanaian context. In Ghana political contest is probably political combat. The 1957 constitution did not endure, according to the IDEG document, as a result of �that sharp contestation between two almost implacable factions of the country�s political elite�. Till today, politics in Ghana perhaps remains largely schismatic, not target-oriented and constructively polemical. Can the political scene in Ghana today be described as a variant of the bi-polar world during the cold war era? Perhaps yes. Two Political Parties, projecting two truths on one issue in one Ghana, hardly ever merging ideas. Ghana has a good constitution with supposedly in-built checks and balances. But that constitution is being operated in the atmosphere of mistrust, with a strong friend-foe dichotomy to the detriment of Ghanaians. And that is affecting the institutions of the state. IDEG said �the success of democratic governance is determined by the degree of TRUST that especially the political elite would invest in the institutions that have been established to ensure that governance is democratic�. �Trust in institutions is premised on the belief that such institutions would act in the best interest of all, and do so with justice and equity for all and sundry�. That is not the situation with Ghana, and the West African country is on the brink of atrophy. A municipal police commander once told a journalist that in the Police Force there are mainly two party apparatchik groups, many with no policing sense. It might be so for many other organisations as a result of the contest of the NPP and the NDC to control the institutions. This is how the IDEG document put it. �Apart from Parliament, there has been a silent struggle within the political elite to control the judiciary and other democracy institutions since the inauguration of the constitution. �The public service and the security agencies have also become victim of such partisan struggles.� Ghana�s cohesion and stability is indeed stake. I see Ghanaians queuing after the political elites in a political cacophonous choreography, with two big bands, queue �A� crouching when elite group �A� leader does so, and queue �B� swinging, when elite group �B� swings. Ghana could collapse because when that dance is on and we are all jigging, we would not see our institutions collapse. In fact our institutions are wobbling. It is becoming distantly impossible for a pupil of average intelligence to attend a public basic school at Anyako, in the Keta Municipal Area and progress into the upper tiers of the educational ladder. This is an example of the deepening disconnect between the people and the professed national aspirations. Anyako was a cradle of education years ago. Mr Kwamena Ameyeklinawo, a retired Public Servant remarked that Ghana�s politics is only a fight to control resources of state and use them, pandering to the whims and caprices of compatriots, lackeys, hangers-on and opportunists. He called for reforms, a way to regulate political activities to make them more functional. Perhaps the current constitutional review exercise is opportune time to discuss the review. Mr Ameyeklinawo said it is important to completely rehash media performance to make it reflect the aspirations of the people and not largely queue up behind the political sides in the country crouching and swinging. It is urgent, Ghana must come out of the woods, led by its leaders, within the current democratic dispensation, pushed by a more critical and analytical civil society, a media fired by a developmental philosophy. That is the only way for the nation to move national growth from crawling to a canter and that surely would come on the wings of a purposeful multi-party governance reforms and certainly not a coup. When this is done Ghana would get serious with reforming its institutions and de-culture corruption to leave resources for a race after country-mates such as Malaysia continuing to gallop away.