Torturing ourselves

Leadership and learning are indispensable to each other — J. F. Kennedy

There are three developments which have saddened my heart and kept me wondering when we would treat ourselves with civility and make processes and things easier and comfortable for one another.

Last Monday, the Ministry of Education held a press conference to allay the fears of parents who are to benefit from the free Senior High School (SHS) policy that no student who has qualified would be left out.

Before then, we had subjected ourselves to another bout of needless and avoidable torture by setting a two-day deadline for parents to go online with their children to find out the schools they had been placed in.

How were we anticipating that volume of requests to go through without subjecting the people to tension and torture? Thankfully, the deadline has been extended.

There is also the torture that prospective service personnel went through during registration. The national service is mandatory and, therefore, service personnel have to make themselves available.
But should the young graduates be tortured in a manner that they become despondent?

The managers of the scheme justifiably frown upon any underhand influences to get students placed in some preferred areas. That means that students must not be saddled with the task of finding a place.

However, it appears some students have been given the task to find placement. When it happens this way, sometimes some institutions are given more students than they request and such students get rejected. When that happens, the students are asked to look for placement on their own.

That to me is not proper. If the scheme managers are to maintain their independence in the placement exercise, then they must be ready to find places for those who are rejected so that the students do not have to bear the cross of finding a place to do their national service. It is equally imperative that organisations are supplied the required number of service personnel based on request or needs assessment.

In this wise, my appeal is to both the headquarters and regional offices of the National Service Scheme to ensure that all students who have been rejected are reassigned. The students must never be burdened with the obligation of seeking placement themselves, securing consent in that wise and informing the secretariat accordingly for their posting letters to be given to them.

We do not have to subject ourselves to needless and avoidable acts of near sadism when there are better ways to handle issues to give comfort and solace.

About the third act of torture, last Monday recorded one of the most monstrous traffic jams at Awutu Breku on the Accra-Winneba road. The police seemed to have abandoned motorists to their fate. By the time the police decided to act or were called upon to act, so much harm had been done as some law-abiding drivers had to endure more than two hours of torture in a jammed traffic situation.

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The idiocy of some Ghanaian drivers and the recklessness of some deviants, close to bestiality, especially those few Ghanaians who think that they can flaunt their tinted glass four wheel vehicles because they are above all others and beyond the reach of the law, made them start driving everywhere and anywhere, irrespective of their direction.

The people were obviously celebrating their annual festival, including parading their chief publicly.

When traffic began to build up slowly from all directions and intersections, the police were not present until all the entry points and the main road became jammed.

There could be no movement. It was then that the police awakened to their obligations, but by then traffic control had become impossible.

Whether the police took up the responsibility on their own or they were called to act, things began to work when they came upon the scene. But law-abiding drivers had to be at a standstill for at least two hours before they could inch past the township.

Since the police knew about the festival, they should have taken preventive action to stem the problem rather than allow the road to be choked before acting to smoothen traffic movement.

More important, the police must have the profile of our deviant drivers, since there are some among us, especially ‘tro-tro’ drivers who do not respect road traffic regulations. It is equally necessary that the police act firmly to stem the sickening madness and idiocy associated with drivers of tinted four-wheel vehicles who have unlawfully installed sirens in their vehicles or flash danger signals and move on the wrong sides of the road as if they are superior beings. Such acts have incensed some Ghanaians who no longer pay heed to sirens or police dispatch riders.

Indeed, some policemen are guiltier when they resort to the opposite direction to jump traffic for personal gain, including sending children to school.

We have to avoid this case of sadism in torturing ourselves needlessly and avoidably.