“Law and order provide framework for stability and development”
–Lee Kuan Yew
“When the government gives you a black goat, say it was a white cow”
–NDC propaganda message
“All right, stone her to death – but only a man who has never sinned may throw the first stone”
— The Living Bible
Sixty years ago, independence came to black Africa. After six months of that period, independence came to Malaysia. After eight years that independence came to black Africa, independence came to Singapore. Today both Malaysia and Singapore are among the world’s developed advanced countries with near zero poverty and unemployment rate while countries in black Africa including Ghana belong to the league of HIPC poor indebted countries wallowing in abject poverty and still looking up to their past colonial masters for handouts to survive.
How did it happen that while Malaysia and Singapore are moving forward towards the stars in arithmetic progression we in black Africa are moving backwards towards the stone ages in geometric progression? The answer is simple. In every society, we have the leadership and we also have the followers. The problem confronting Africa lies in the types of leadership and followers the continent has been bequeathed with.
Since independence. Africa has produced as leaders shameless, half-baked educated literates, brutal slave raiders, wicked criminals, greedy bastards, bootleggers whose stock in trade is to loot and share their nation’s wealth amongst themselves. On the flip side, the continent produced as followers, shameless gaping sycophants, gullible hypocrites, spineless bootlickers, illiterate praise singers, people who could not ask for accountability from their leaders, people who behaved like freed poultry chickens oblivious of their freedom. As Kofi Wayo said: “how do you fight for people who do not know what they want?” The sad situation has continued up to this day.
At the dawn of independence, the freedom fighters who fought for independence from the colonial masters were ill-prepared to manage the peace thereafter. As such they turned their still smoking guns on their compatriots. All the people who opposed them were branded enemies of the state, haunted down, put in dungeons worse than those dungeons the white slave masters entombed their poor black slaves en route to the new world and left to die very terrible deaths. It happened all over Africa. In Ghana, Kwame Nkrumah put J. B. Danquah in preventive detention and made sure that he was subjected to all sorts of inhuman treatment till he succumbed to death.
While J. B. Danquah was in prison, Kwame Nkrumah directed that J.B. Danquah should be fed on gari which caused his health to deteriorate. When Kwame Nkrumah realised that J. B. Danquah was dying, he directed that the maltreatment be aped and was put in chains. Eventually J.B. Danquah died in prison like a common criminal. Contrast this with what happened in South Africa. In South Africa, when Nelson Mandela fell sick in prison, the white establishment moved him to a first class hospital for treatment until he recovered before sending him back to prison. While Kwame Nkrumah supervised the death of J.B. Danquah in prison, Nelson Mandela was released from prison by the white establishment to become president over them.
Fast track how Kwame Nkrumah rendered complete nonsense the political life of Ako Adjei and eventually left him to die a broken man. Who did not share a tear the day Jerry John Rawlings hang a national medal around the neck of the shoulder bowed Ako Adjei? Despite the fact that J. B. Danquah and Ako Adjei were the persons who made it possible for Kwame Nkrumah to be brought back to Ghana, he turned round to emasculate and finally destroy them to achieve his own personal political ambition. Africa is littered on the continent with brutal dictators who murdered their compatriots in order to remain in power for personal grandeur.
Today the CPP Kwame Nkrumah founded to destroy the UGCC has been completely dismembered with no head, tail or midsection while the NPP, the offshoot of the UGCC is in power. Indeed, Nkrumah never dies, long live to his messianic dedication. Anybody reading the account of the pigsty treatment Kwame Nkrumah meted out to J. B. Danquah and deliberately plotted his painful and untimely death would want a quick answer to the question: “is there salvation for the blackman?”
Let us take a critical look at the Delta Force tragedy and question ourselves if anybody can share the dreams of Nana Akufo-Addo of a bright future for this country considering the types of leadership and followers we have cultivated since independence. . Why is virtually everybody, the educated literates and the uneducated illiterates, condemning the men of the Delta Force? When did all of them find their voices to condemn the infringement of law and order in our society?
What informed those hosts and panelists of some FM stations sympathetic to the NPP to go on a wild goose chase spiting and spewing out effluent in the direction of the Delta Force. Some even misguidedly and uncannily compared the Delta Force tragedy with the Muntie 3 tragedy.
There appears to be a subtle attempt on the part of the leadership of the NPP to distance itself from the tragedy since it happened. Why does it appear that the leadership of the NPP is very wary as to how to handle the tragedy and thereby giving ammunition to the NDC to ride the spotlight in an area where the NDC is least qualified to comment on? If the NPP leadership can forgive the two party stalwarts who shamelessly traded insults and criminal accusations at each other in the open after apologising and accept them back into its fold, why can the same thing not be done to the men of the Delta Force?
What our nascent democracy would have expected would have been resignation letters to precede the apology letters form the two warrior party stalwarts. What type of democracy have we given to ourselves that political appointees find public and political service so juicy that they cannot dream of living outside the limelight of public or political office? What sort of wretched lives do private people lead before they enter into sumptuous glutinous public and political offices that makes honourable resignation appears a distant dream if not a mirage?
Where were the educated elites and the opinion leaders in this country who are today condemning the men of the Delta Force who failed even to raise their middle fingers in protest at the numerous criminal infringements committed during the short period of the criminal corrupt greedy John Dramani Mahama NDC administration? How many thought of raising funds to meet the medical and economic rehabilitation of the innocent victim whose one eye was destroyed by the marauding brutal men of the nation/s police service during the peaceful demonstration to the offices of the Electoral Commission?
Did we not get a former woman Vice-Chancellor and a prominent woman activist who happens to be a lawyer among others to sign a petition to cajole John Dramani Mahama to release from lawful custody the Muntie 3 who had openly declared their criminal intention and capabilities to rape the Chief Justice and bring other equally terrible mayhem on other justices of the Supreme Court? Sycophancy and hypocrisy, pure and simple, at the highest intellectual leadership level.
E-mail” macgyasi@gmail.com
BY Kwame Gyasi