Development versus democracy?
The week and its multi-faceted developments, amply reported and commented upon in all media, have set me thinking about the ends of government. Perhaps, Ghanaians do not want their lives transformed by government qua government at all.
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I shall give copious examples of this rotten national mindset to put my point across presently. It is simply a quandary to me the way we apprehend and appreciate issues.
No, I do not believe we do justice to the phenomenon when we dismiss this mindset as the politicisation of every single issue in the land to do with the public welfare. It is more with the willing refusal to engage our common sense, our gumption, and our sense of the past and the future to guide our present.
Police conduct
Let me start with the issue that set me wondering along these lines. A violent, unscripted and unplanned demonstration is held by residents of the razed-down Sodom and Gomorrah. So far so good as the account goes. The violence is manifest by the angry demonstrators as they wield offensive weapons and charge upon the unarmed police as they withdrew in some confusion to make way for armed police to replace them.
This incident is then pounced on by some of us both in the media and the bigger public to castigate the police for being cowardly. Really? Have we taken time to digest what our accusation of cowardly means to our much-harassed police and the events of the day?
Assuming the police predicted correctly from intelligence the likelihood of violence and prepared accordingly with massive offensive gear to meet the angry demonstrators, what would have happened? In all likelihood, we would be spending our precious time discussing the casualties occasioned by police high-handedness, and the use of unjustified force by the same police we accuse of cowardice today.
We may think we are clever when we behave this way as endless chatter-boxes, but we are not. Is it not striking that in spite of the fury unleashed that day, no one died? What the police need from us is fulsome congratulations and praise that the wanton violence unleashed by the displaced residents did not end in needless deaths or wanton injuries, setting off another round of useless chatter. Our police did very well by keeping their cool in the face of lawless provocations and I doff my heart to my senior brother the IGP, and his hardworking men and women.
Illegal settlement
Of course I decline to understand those false champions of the displaced residents which residents have formed an association with the wonderful name Slum Union of Ghana! To travel a long distance from home to settle on land without any title to it, and worse, situated on a watercourse, in addition to the foregoing, forming the basis for government action for years to not only prevent the erection of shanty towns, but also to clear the watercourse of the Odaw and associated courseways of rivers that empty into the ocean, and expect that this illegal way of settling the land would be tolerated forever, is to live in a fools’ paradise.
A previous government secured the necessary orders to move them out but declined. That is no problem, at least to me. But how can a refusal to do something in the public weal today invalidate it another day when the same conditions not only persist, but have been worsened by the ruinous flood of the year? Are we sure in our conscience today that if it is not the current mayor, Oko Vanderpuije, it won’t be another mayor in future?
I believe some of us really believe that there are no casualties to development and even in our democracy. That a state of arrested development is the perfect state that we should aim for, that every act of improving our current circumstances must be opposed and opposed mindlessly even if we desire a new market, a new school, a factory, a new road, or a new facility to better our circumstances. There is a simple way to test one’s love for reason in such situations. Would the party or individuals you prefer repopulate Sodom and Gomorrah and encourage the danger it poses to all of us in the event, God forbid, a similar flood and fire occur?
Priestly duties
I also believe that in addition to the lack of appreciation that attends our discussion and analysis of such issues, we also have large and unreasonable dosages of impatience imbedded in our Ghanaian genes. The very people who decry all sorts of projects are the same who expect more from the government. I always get sad when I listen to Bishop Dag Heward-Mills in a sermon preached early in the life of the President Mahama administration, hectoring the government to fulfill all its manifesto promises immediately.
It is a mark of how far we have come in our appreciation of public issues that a priest can take government to task for not fulfilling its promises. Is it part of priestly functions to demand the realisation of manifesto promises? And in a very short time indeed? Why was it necessary to demand the construction of 200 senior high schools in deprived areas months after the government assumed office? Are churches built immediately? Perhaps, everyone in church is saved and there is nothing more to preach on to effect salvation.
I do not accept that commenting negatively on each and every phenomena with sour characteristic sneering as if to say we know better, is a mark of the educated and enlightened citizen. Development not only takes time but also has consequences, and we do ourselves a disservice when we falsely believe and propagate that it does not.