The chief of Chiraa Traditional Area, in the Sunyani West District of the Bono Region, Nana Afari Mintah, is reported to have told Ghanaians that the country can only be “fixed” if all the citizens come together to play their respective roles.
According to the revered chief, “Governance is not for a single person or few people to undertake. It is a collective responsibility. It is for all of us to contribute our quota in developing the country.”
He therefore called on all Ghanaians to, “in unity, support the President in discharging his vision to develop Ghana.”
Right call
For us at the Daily Statesman, we believe the chief could not have put it better than he did. Truly, “Governance is not for a single person or few people to undertake.” When we wake up from our beds daily, all our activities that we embark on, from dawn to dusk, are what determine the forward or backward march of our country. From the informal economy player at the market to the ‘suit and tie’ formal public or civil servant, our individual decisions are what determine the collective development of our country.
Ghana, as the chief rightly pointed out, cannot be fixed if citizens find means to dodge security details to engage in illegal mining to destroy land, forest and water bodies. Ghana cannot be fixed if after all the tax incentives, the informal economy player still prices his/her commodity in an obvious deliberate attempt to dupe the consumer. It cannot be fixed if the person given the mandate to create opportunities for others find it as an avenue to amass wealth through sale of the opportunities to the highest bidder. It cannot be fixed when the civil or public servant who is supposed to be at work by 8am gets there around 11am, spends about two hours chatting and playing with his phone, and leaves the office by 3pm, instead of 5pm.
As a country, a lot of negatives have been normalised such that the person who does the right thing is rather seen as doing the wrong thing. We throw rubbish indiscriminately, defecate anywhere, disobey traffic rules, among other, vices.
The country prides itself as ‘religious’, with close to 90 per cent of the population being Christians and Muslims, yet no one can leave his door open for just 30 minutes without another breaking in.
Leadership is a cause
It is true that leadership is a cause, and all other things are effect. The people reciprocate what leadership produces for them. But it is also true that each and every individual is a leader in his or her own right. What examples are teachers setting for their students? What examples are religious leaders setting for their congregants? What examples are traditional leaders setting for their subjects? How about parents and their kids, student leaders and their colleagues, among others. By extension, it can be seen that leadership of this country goes beyond political leaders and that everyone, in one way the other, is leading someone. The examples we are all setting for ourselves determine whether the systemic breakdown of our country can be fixed or not.
And that is why we associate ourselves with the position of the revered traditional leader that ‘fixing the country is a collective responsibility’.
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