A sorry feature of our political life is that those who should be guiding us in playing out our civic roles as patriotic citizens are the very ones taking advantage of our huge illiteracy and ignorance levels for political profit.
From our pre-independence struggles to independence, through military dispensations to our democratic dispensation, the question of what is in our collective interests has been thrown to the background, with cliquish and mercenary interests taking centre stage.
What has happened over the decades is that we have tended, in dealing with critical political issues, to be ‘more Catholic than the Pope’ as a nascent democracy.
Moody’s, Fitch et al
That is why it is worrying that the saga of Ghana being downgraded has become a ridicule point, when the issue in a sober nation should have been a national conversation on how to prove Moody’s and Fitch wrong by getting our acts together and growing above the 4% and 4.5% that rating agencies and development partners predict for Ghana in 2022.
To think that the whole debate would turn a Hearts of Oak and Asante Kotoko ‘fight’, with the eyes green and veins bloating, is to admit that we, particularly those who claim to be leading us, have a long way to go in reforming themselves, even before they pretend to love God or country.
Instances
How deep-seated that culture is becoming is manifest in how certain communities, for instance, mistreat activists, individuals or ‘opposition’ political opponents. And we may refer to instances where presidential candidates had been stoned in enemy territory, or polling agents in unfamiliar territory threatened with death.
We may also refer to the abuse of the Keta Sea Defence system and the fallout that has forced us as a nation to fork our resources to redo a project, when we could have been patriotic in maintaining, instead of ‘bastardising’, the infrastructure that had been designed to protect us.
Additionally, we may refer to the ‘angry’ and ‘opposition’ countenance on the faces of beneficiaries of state and private sector benevolence when a National Disaster Management Organisation team visited affected victims and sites to distribute relief items.
Guilty
How guilty we have all been as a people is reflected lately in the lack of objectivity attending the conversation about the E-Levy, regardless of the impact the novel revenue mobilisation measure is expected to generate in transforming our economy.
Now, we have capped all that with a section of our political actors accusing the government of using the court systems to force the E-Levy on “the good people of Ghana”. And some of these people are lawyers and other professionals who know that the case about the Assin-North MP being hauled before the court may be as lawful as the case of another government having tried and sentenced another MP previously accused of the same illegality.
Legacy
In the opinion of the Daily Statesman, we are seeing too many of these bad examples that it is time for our legislators to lead in showing better examples in civic activity, engagement, tolerance and peacebuilding in our constituencies and on our national political communication turfs.
We diminish our value in the estimation of the global community and development partners when we act in the way we do, with respected legislators, for example, holding press conferences shooting down our judicial system in clearly embarrassing cases.
In the name of Mother Ghana, let us please have some decency in our body politic.
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