At the time I first encountered this term, it was discussed as a sociological concept, not with the best connotations or language associations. It was translated as a group of people who were like outcasts placed at the bottom of a hierarchy of human groups into a favourite group. If anyone discovered self to be part of the group, it would be a lifetime struggle fighting it or saving it.
Just imagine ‘congresspeople’ find no worry in labelling their group the untouchables! From the ‘we no go sit down’ days when junior workers parading as P/WDCs or CDRs, who were congress forebears ruled, they have continually and regularly returned to their society, ruining behaviours cultivated and displayed in those days. They begin with the attitude that everything of the motherland is their bona fide property such as power, resources, positions, wealth and even the rest of humans who resist their nation-wrecking plans and actions.
Congresspeople’s sense of leadership is completely at variance with development effort. Development is achieved by harnessing the energy of a people which is then applied to mobilizing resources to make things happen. Things happen in altruistically directed and implemented actions. What is done, any action planned and taken, must be because it is right, good and proper. Not so in congress understanding of development. In their thinking, it is about appropriating everything that the motherland owns as theirs and theirs only – everyone else excluded.
By that unruly attitude, they have established a culture of ‘government is procurement’ in our dear motherland. Go and take big money dollar 35 million and make as much as you can out of it to build a factory that has no raw material to feed it and congratulate yourself on bringing development to a town. Absolute heartless wickedness! Procurement spree everywhere anytime they find themselves in government. Their selfishness in creating, looting and sharing is without bounds.
Law and order, they say, is the foundation of development. If you have people who are orderly by respecting societal laid down rules and regulations, it improves dramatically the chances of that people experiencing development. The mother law and order document of the motherland was written and signed by ‘congresspeople’. Some 20 years on, they will dishonestly come back to tell us they will rewrite it all over again. Perhaps they forgot to insert in it that their party chairman is above the law.
These people had no business gruesomely murdering judges and a retired military officer so they can monopolise power and feed off the motherland for as long as they have been. They certainly had no business murdering General Kutu Acheampong and his seven colleagues. It defies total logic that Acheampong who left no debt (contracted by his regime because no one would lend him money) would be killed and those who have mortgaged the future of the youth drenched in debt would live.
They seem to have realized their folly in resisting registering to obtain the national identity card. The way I know them, they have discovered a way to introduce schemes of ensuring it inures to their advantage. When they pretended they were resisting, they had not developed systems that would fully drive their stealing ways. I just heard people were surreptitiously being registered in the night after closing hours. I hadn’t heard anything like that at the time they had boycotted the exercise.
It is strange that they have never heard those who seek to rule must first learn to obey. If you examine political leadership in prospering communities, the most effective is by people who had been made to live humble law abiding lives. From our ancestors, Greeks through Romans and both modern dictatorship and democracy, the most effective leaders have been those who appreciated humility.
‘Congresspeople’ breed their leaders from an amp?br? class. All one needs to succeed is to run around lying through the teeth on radio, television or social media. In trying to twist the Constitution to their favour, they made the national communications law which contradicts the Constitution’s free speech and expression spirit. Now that they are caught in their own trap, they say they are above the law and untouchable.
They don’t seem to know women. It’s no negative labelling. But I mean it positively that you don’t push them around when it comes to doing the right thing by enforcing a law written by ‘congresspeople’ themselves. I am sure their ‘our chairman can say or do anything he likes’ stance would see the real power of women entrusted with the authority to enforce the law they (congresspeople) instituted. Mark my word, the untouchable chairman shall be legally touched.
By Kwasi Ansu-Kyeremeh