WHAT’S GOING ON?????????

     

January 2012 will go down in Ghana’s political history as one heck of a boisterous and particularly sobering month. The shameful revelations in the public sphere have a peculiarly wrenching way of doling out tones of pain to the heart and copious waves of utter confusion to the cerebrum of any true patriot of this our Republic. The dry, dust dispensing, mist laden, humid harmattan days provide an eerie backdrop to this melodrama of a soap opera that we citizens have become a captive audience of. The numbing cold reality in spite of the spin, accusations, counter-accusations and clear outright fudging from all corners of the realm is this: the hard-earned, scarce, bona fide, collectively owned financial resources of the citizens of this Republic have essentially been stolen through a well oiled, orchestrated, devilish yet rather infantile scam of a scheme that touches worryingly the presidency, bureaucracy and party apparatchiks.

 It seems as if something deep in the national consciousness has died. The narratives that have gone abroad especially from those who wield influence in the Republic skirts around what is clearly mind boggling amounts of national financial resources that have simply left the Treasury so easily and tragically at the behest of the technocratic power of our key national institutions. Alas white collar crime and deliberate dereliction of duty under the umbrella of a constitutional order has become the new game in town.

The great Ghanaian philosopher-musicologist Ephraim Amu had counseled us decades ago to be wary of nhoma nimdeɛ huhu(to wit the mortal danger of knowledge derived from books which acquire a worthless airy character on account of serving nefarious ends). Amu correctly diagnosed the moral vapidity of the character of some of our compatriots that could trigger acts directed at national retrogression: nimdeɛ ntraso nkotokrane ne apɛsɛmenkomenya(to wit a vain sense of haughty superiority and crass selfishness). For Amu such traits and rightly so reflect deep invidious character deformation and undermine the love of nation (Adi yɛn bra mu dɛm ama yen Asaase hɔ do atɔmu sɛ). The fall-out ultimately for all this drama of close to 600million euros seeping from the national treasury into the capacious hands of individuals and companies is the bastardization of our national institutions whose credibility in normal times has always raised searching questions. With such credibility questions how can Ghana’s elites (in the  bureaucracy, presidency, government and the political parties) be reasonably expected to lead the onerous task of urgent national reconstruction? Democratic government hinges on dollops of trust in pursuit of the commonweal because all of us cannot be in these key institutions en masse. But the danger also is that such trust can be sorely abused under the veil and indeed imprimatur of democratic governance which sorry juncture our Republic seems to have come to. 

The grave question to ask is: how long would tax-paying, God fearing, hardworking, law abiding, nation loving citizens of this our Republic(who are in the majority) continue to accept the “no money” lie in the face of plane loads of wasted money and decrepit, pathetic, moribund, lethargic socio-economic amenities?