By Richard DABLAH
The contemporary impulse to rename public infrastructure in response to historical wrongdoing reflects a broader uncertainty about how democratic orders should relate to their own origins. The proposal to rename Kotoka International Airport should be evaluated within this uncertainty, rather than as a discrete moral judgment on an individual figure.
Public naming operates as a classificatory act, not a declarative one. It fixes reference; it does not confer virtue. Legal and administrative systems rely on such fixity precisely because political authority evolves through correction, not erasure. To treat public names as endorsements is to misunderstand their institutional function.
The figure of Emmanuel Kwasi Kotoka enters Ghana’s public memory not as a moral exemplar but as a causal agent in a constitutional rupture. The 1966 coup represented a failure of institutional balance within the post-independence state: weak constraints on executive authority, unresolved civil–military relations, and declining public confidence in civilian governance. These conditions were structural. Assigning retrospective moral liability to a single actor misconstrues the nature of the event and obscures responsibility at the systemic level.
Renaming the airport in response to present-day ethical norms risks producing a false form of closure. It suggests that symbolic correction can substitute for institutional learning. Political theory offers little support for this view. Stable democratic orders do not eliminate records of rupture; they incorporate them as negative reference points. The authority of constitutionalism rests on remembered failure as much as on celebrated success.
There is also a problem of temporal coherence. Democratic legitimacy depends on continuity of legal and historical reference across generations. When public memory is repeatedly recalibrated to satisfy contemporary sentiment, the relationship between law, history, and authority becomes unstable. Memory turns from record into instrument.
Comparative experience reinforces this concern. Democracies routinely retain public sites named after figures implicated in emergency rule, war, or contested authority. This practice reflects neither moral indifference nor endorsement but an understanding that state formation is not an ethical exercise but a political one, governed by necessity, error, and constraint.
In Ghana’s case, the consolidation of constitutional rule did not require the suppression of coup-era memory. It required the institutionalization of civilian supremacy, judicial review, and electoral legitimacy. These achievements derive their authority from contrast with the past, not its deletion.
Renaming Kotoka International Airport would not deepen democratic accountability. It would relocate moral discomfort from institutional analysis to symbolic gesture. Such displacement may satisfy expressive demands, but it does not strengthen constitutional culture.
- The question, therefore, is not whether the name is agreeable, but whether a democratic polity benefits from narrowing its historical field to figures that conform to present moral comfort. Political maturity suggests the opposite.
A republic capable of governing itself does not require its past to be virtuous. It requires its memory to be intact.
*Memoria non absolvit, sed instruit.*
Memory does not absolve; it instructs.
