Needed: Ministry for discipline
Writer Garrett Fort warned long ago, “You have created a monster and it will destroy you”.
That is our collective failure, as adult Ghanaians.
Discipline has left the home; even in school, the teacher is struggling with methods of discipline in the absence of corporal punishment.
Students are now carrying weapons on themselves to school – and their parents don’t know it.
A student almost lost her eyesight because a student fired a gun.
A few years ago, SHS 3 students in a certain school went on a rampage because the school authorities did not allow them to do as they liked in the examination hall!
Our politicians are no better.
They are too busy buying votes; worse, they are exchanging fisticuffs on the floor of the House and snatching ballot papers.
Now, the monster we created, called Frankenstein, has run amok. Students are physically manhandling their tutors.
Unable to bear it any longer, NAGRAT has given the government an ultimatum to address the situation by the end of the month or face “protective action” from teachers against violent students.
That is when President John Dramani Mahama responded.
At his meeting with the Catholic Bishops Conference at the Jubilee House on Friday, May 23, he emphasised the need for collective action to reverse the trend, hinting at the imperative to look at curriculum design, moral education, student discipline and teacher absenteeism.
Our problem has become insoluble because the beasts have now drunk politics.
These beasts are the ones we see during elections. Remember 2012 when some hoodlums assaulted Ursula Owusu in the Odododiodoo area.
Still talking about the runaway national problem with indiscipline, we remember the “hey days” of Agbogbloshie and the area in front of the Kaneshie Market and good old Makola – before the decongestion?
I don’t know about other regions, but in Accra, groups of young men on motorbikes, with horns blaring, would stop at traffic intersections, creating a path for a hearse on its way to the cemetery. No one dares stand in their way, not even the police. In the name of religion!
That is “state of nature” – a nation where no law applies to human conduct.
In Ghana, this state of nature persists for one and only one reason: if you touch those boys, you will lose your life or suffer permanent disability.
If you clamp down on traders illegally occupying the street, you will lose an election.
Prescription
The prescription by Thomas Hobbes and John Locke, for creating a state with absolute power to enforce the laws, is not applicable in Ghana because the law enforcer is subject to the orders of politicians. The IGP, CDS et all are political appointees.
With or without politics, I have always sided with the prescription of some social psychologists, who argue that using force or external influence to obtain compliance amounts to "negative discipline."
In its place, they advocate internal discipline, what they call “a mental attitude” to obtain “a habit of obedience”.
This is the ideal, to which I subscribe, and which forms the reason for my column this week.
I am arguing for a state of affairs where the Ghanaian would, by a subtle and gradual process of education and human re-orientation, readily obey laws, willingly and consciously refuse to litter or engage in indiscriminate dumping of waste and willingly refuse to engage in open defaecation.
Paul Kegame of Rwanda, an African country, achieved this in five years – and we can. In Ghana’s type of democracy, it will take the use of powerful, creative and subtle communication to apply socio-psychological methods.
We will have to communicate with images on TV and sounds/voices on radio, TikTok, etc; it will take the use of men and women of influence such as Professor Opanyin Agyekum, Bernard Avle, KSM, etc, perhaps a few of the very respectable MPs, the Chief Justice, the Mensa Otabils, Apostle Eric Nyamekyes, Palmer Buckles, Aglow International, among others.
Before then, however, or along with the psychological operations, I advocate the creation of a Ministry Responsible for Discipline. That may be a long stretch, but my emphasis here is that we need something more than platitudes and resolutions.
In Ghana, who would be the Minister for Discipline? The “buga-buga” method would not work; it does not last.
The Minister for Sanitation should have Professor Agyemang Badu Akosa’s gift of advocacy, the man who, within 24 hours, changed the breakfast habits of thousands of Ghanaians.
Akosa was on air one afternoon advocating the eating of Hausa Koko and Kose for breakfast.
The following day, there were long queues of people, including car-fuls, at all the Hausa kooko joints in Accra.
This was achieved without force, without insults.
Imagine every pastor, prophet or Imam preaching cleanliness every Friday and Sunday! Ninety-eight per cent of people who litter belong to one church, mosque or the other.
The writer is the Executive Director,
Centre for Communication and Culture.
E-mail: ashonenimil@gmail.com
