Well said, Prof Naana Jane, but…..
The best speech made by Professor Naana Jane Opoku-Agyemang ever since she was inaugurated as Vice President of our Republic was at the PENSA Ghana Conference 2026 at the Gomoa Pentecost Worship Centre this week.
I am referring to that portion of her address in which she stressed the truism that “character, not just academic qualifications, will shape the nation’s future.”
Hear her: “Leadership does not start with titles, and academic achievement does not begin with certificates.
They are cultivated intentionally and rooted in a set of core values”.
The Vice President of Ghana was at pains to point out that “ambition disconnected from values can be dangerous”, and that “What you practise now, in small and seemingly private ways, establishes the patterns that later govern public life.
Leadership is defined as much by character as it is by credentials.”
Two reasons have compelled me to return to this call for an urgently needed national moral crusade.
One is the Vice President’s address at the above-cited forum of PENSA.
Readers of this column would recall that in August last year, I released an article urging the Vice President to add to her KPIs, a crusade against indiscipline and immorality.
The other is a book from the “NAKY NUGGET SERIES” which are being used in schools.
It is titled, CREATIVE ARTS and is a “Learners’ Book 6” based on the New Standard Based Curriculum.
In this book, the authors, MR OPPONG K. CHRISTOPHER and MR ANNING KARIKARI-GYEBI, as an apparent example of creative writing, publishes a long poem on the duality and unexpected consequences of our choices in life.
What many at the GES did not know about this poem is that it is a modified version of a long existing one in which the authors have substituted some words.
In this display of warped creativity, they fail to credit the source of the original poetic style.
My beef today is, however, not about the legalities of publishing. My objection, as a parent, is the tastelessness of the language employed and the insult to womanhood.
From manure to plants and flowers and their uses, the poem’s syllogism descends into “trees” whose uses, they say, are either for making paper or furniture.
Now, dear reader, please, read on:
“If you are used for tissue paper, there are two things involved.
It’s either you are used by a man or by a woman
If you are used by a man, you are safe.
If you are used by a woman, there are two things involved.
It’s either she uses you from the back or from the front….
If you are used from front, there are two things involved.
It’s either you contract gonorrhoea of HIV”
What are children supposed to make of this?
And Ghana Education Service calls it “creativity”?
I am disappointed that there was no-one in the GES approval system who could point out the objectionable use of language here?
Anybody from the Ghana Association of Writers could have pointed out that this poem does not originate from Oppong K. Christopher and Anning Karikari-Gyebi.
I am further disappointed that there were no women on the selection panel awake enough to object to the book’s approval.
No wonder, the level of depravity in society.
Any wonder we are witnessing mass failures in examinations?
Approving this book for use in schools is an example of the lack of proper supervision in the educational system.
Anything goes in a society where everybody is looking for any means of making money.
Even as I celebrate the learned Professor’s newly found passion, I can only pray that this becomes her most important KPI, a passion which will soon spread to infect her immediate staff of the Office of the Vice President, and with time, the entire Jubilee House.
In an article published on this page of the Daily Graphic recently, I urged Naana Jane: “Here is your mandate.
Let it be said of you that the first female Vice President worked to save Ghana from depravity.”
In that article, I was at pains to remind her and all of Ghana that this country “is going through its worst moral crisis, second only to the conditions prevailing in the nation a few years preceding the June 4 Revolution.”
I repeat that Ghana has come to a time in its life when forces of immorality are overwhelming it.”
The prevalent culture in Ghana now is the deadly dog-eat-dog situation of thieves and cut-throats willing to lie, harm or kill each other to acquire what society defines as success.
The learned Professor Vice President is reminded that she has a choice to be the lame Vice President reading speeches written by civil servants, waiting for assignments from the President (more or less a “Driver’s Mate”), or proactively using her position and womanhood to carve a niche in the moral and social redemption of Ghana.
