Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.
I'm going to start with the institutionalization of the political parties and their capacity to be able to enforce or enhance our democracy.
Yes, a lot has been happening, as I said, because we started anew. A lot of institution building had to take place, and the NDI and some other organizations working in the area of building political parties are a real help.
As of now, as I speak, there is established in Ghana what we call an IPAC, an inter-party yearly consultation, which is supported by Denmark and the Netherlands, and they are helping to build capacities in our political parties. The result is that the bickering that you have seen among political parties between 1992 and 1996 has died down considerably.
Indeed, but for that, the 2004 election could have been in some kind of turmoil, but because of the existence of this kind of IPAC and consultations within parties.... There is an institute, what they call the party chairmen forum, where they meet once every month to look at issues that are bothering them. There is what we call the general secretaries of parties meeting, which comes quarterly. All these things help. A think tank called the Institute of Economic Affairs is in charge of doing this.
So as we grow the parliamentary democracy, so also is the political party growth coming along. The result is that a lot of dialogue is going into our democratic structures rather than into bickering and war. That is the issue there. But of course, learning processes go on for quite a time, and it will take some time before we succeed.
Now, on the issue of our human rights generally, Zimbabwe and what's happening in Somalia, these two areas are a big concern to Africa. But I think in the past few years a lot has happened in Africa, and if nothing else, the institution that we call the African peer review mechanism has toned down the excesses of a lot of militant leaders in the sense that your neighbours, your peers, are ready to hold you to account and sometimes chastise you, and in certain extreme cases, if you even contemplate coming by any other means apart from democratic means, they are ready to jettison you.
So we think the APRM.... The reports coming in on the first few countries that offered to be peer-reviewed have been, I think, quite encouraging in helping others to offer themselves for peer review. We in Ghana happen to be one of the very first countries to offer ourselves for peer review, and the results are not as bad as people might think. In fact, it has really encouraged a lot of other countries.
So human rights issues are being confronted. Zimbabwe and Somalia are peculiar cases, and maybe we will have to talk with a lot of foreign or international relations aspects to be able to work on these. Because to me, the Zimbabwe issue has just moved from...it's not merely a human rights issue. That's somebody who I think is a megalomaniac and has gone.... Maybe we need a psychiatrist to work on people of that nature.
As for Somalia, that's another story altogether, and maybe we would need a whole day to talk about it.