The coarsening of public discourse
We may not in totality realise it but some of us are gradually coming around to the firm agreement that our tempers in the marketplace of ideas and speech are rapidly deteriorating.
Advertisement
A vociferous minority of us, pampered, encouraged and inspired by a shameless, amoral and feckless media, are bent on trying the most elastic limits of our collective patience and seeking everyday to say something, anything, to destroy the bonds that hold us together as one nation.
This minority uses just about anything, anything, no matter how irrelevant it is to the general concerns of Ghanaians today to drive home an agenda of hate and despair amongst our people.
Generally, the main issues in our public discussions as of now are the depreciation of the cedi as against other currencies, demolitions and clearance of trespassers on Tema lands by the TDC and the perennial spectre of corruption in public affairs. Each and everyone of these matters are serious matters indeed, and I do understand fully the passions that drive our apprehension and comprehensions of the varied issues involved and the direct impact they have on our daily lives and prosperity.
It would seem, however, from unfolding events that gradually, our appreciation, discussion and understanding of these very important public issues are being deliberately shaped and contorted by some of us determined to lead us into the gutters of confusion and mutual hatreds. These provocateurs do not even shy away from the provocation of the inevitable violence, welcoming it as a cathartic final solution to the powerlessness of mere speech.
Some of us have seized upon public apprehensions of these matters and sought to deepen and widen justifiable public disquiet by dragging in other unrelated issues, seeking our acceptance of outrageous arguments in order to cloak their destructive politicking in the respectability of genuine concerns.
The current violent discussion of the 49th anniversary of the unfortunate passage of Dr Joseph Boakye Danquah is a perfect case in point. I disagree with the choice of Parliament as the venue for the celebration of this sad event in our national history. The day before the disputed statement by Mr Atta-Akyea was the exact day, 49 years ago, on which Dr Danquah passed away in preventive custody in Nsawam. Why didn’t the New Patriotic Party (NPP), which considers him as one of the founders of their political tradition, fail to mark the day, especially, since the national council of the party held a meeting that day?
The death of Dr Danquah in detention in 1965 is one of those events that make Nkrumah’s legacy in his country of birth a sharply contested one, while he enjoys universal adulation outside our borders as a fighter for the freedoms of the Black race from colonialism and racial discrimination. Dr Danquah was powerless to effect any change in the affection in which Nkrumah was held in this country, having lost his parliamentary seat twice to the CPP and the presidency to Osagyefo Nkrumah. For someone who had not been brought before any court in the land to die in a condemned cell as if he was destined for the gallows after trial, his conviction and sentencing is a serious blot on the stellar careers of those who were responsible for this political crime.
By transferring the marking of this event to the floor of Parliament the following day, the NPP MP was deliberately inviting and provoking all of us to treat the memory of this nationalist politician with partisan disdain. And so it happened.
We now know that the words uttered that day in Parliament by a deputy Information Minister, Murtala Mohammed, in reaction to the statement was deliberately edited by partisan journalists to make him appear insensitive and wicked. As it must have been intended all along, the misrepresentation generated immediate and very vigorous reaction.
Why was it necessary to provoke this kind of reaction in memory of Dr Danquah? But the crass politicking has not ended.
Fortuitously or crazily enough, the Ghana Academy of Arts and Sciences, the highest society of learning, the propagation of knowledge in this country is set to add another chapter to this coarsening politics of savagery later this month when its annual JB Danquah Lecture Series would be delivered by the loquacious Professor Agyeman Badu Akosa, an unrepentant defender of the Preventive Detention Act (PDA) under which Dr Danquah was detained till he died. The topic for the lectures this year: ‘’Ghana’s Polarised Political Terrain!”
I cannot imagine that eminent and knowledgeable members of the Ghana Academy would invite an acknowledged pathologist to give a lecture not in his field where his views are well respected, but in the minefield of politics, in the name of the very person who died in the operation of one of the most obnoxious pieces of legislation ever passed by our Parliament and which the speaker has spoken out in support. Dr Danquah was a foundation fellow of the Academy in 1959. How Orwellian can the Ghana Academy be?
Professor Akosa will certainly rehash his unfortunate views on the PDA, the upshot of which would be that the death of Dr Danquah in political detention was proper and correct. He will repeat these obnoxious views on a platform erected by the Ghana Academy in the name of Dr Danquah and he would receive the approbation of the academy for putting a knife into the long-dead body of Dr Danquah.
The majority of the members of the Ghana Academy, I daresay, are not admirers of Nkrumah, even though President Nkrumah founded the academy. Professor Akosa is a famous pathologist, meaning that all his patients are dead. His views on politics cannot proceed from any specific expertise in the field of politics or personal experience, especially as he himself is a fellow of the academy.
If the most learned people in this country are prepared to invite such rancid views into our body politic in the name of the academy, then it means they are fully in agreement with the worsening and coarsening of our discourse on our public issues. It is bad enough that those of the lower orders have no models of sweet speech and rational conduct to look up to for direction and guidance in behaviour, but it is worse when the mentors themselves are neck-deep in the needless savagery of dissent gradually taking over the space for public discourse.