Ghana’s Unrepentant Ugly Face (1)

Good or promising news coming from Ghana these days are few and far between. What has become of the goodwill of Ghana, her leadership? These two indices may lose their moral currency in the widening haziness of leadership ineptitude, barrage of corruption, and public lackadaisicalness toward seeking the corrective hand of social justice in the ugly face of social decay. Fear is that Ghana’s prospect of losing her goodwill and leadership preeminence, both made possible by Kwame Nkrumah’s sense of fairness as well as by his prescience, philanthropy, patriotism, visionary, and technocratic appurtenances, to the malignancy of social apathy and leadership ineptness is measurably high if adequate care is not taken to arrest the escalating rate of social decay. This is neither alarmist nor apocalyptic.

Of course, hardly a day goes by without one form or another dreadful news arresting public attention. It is cholera, corruption, armed robbery, and open bipartisan trade in political insults yesterday and defecation in public spaces, vulgar journalism, poor public sanitation, and so on today. Environmental pollution, electoral rigging, genetically modified organism (GMOs), and Economic Partnership Agreement (EPA) tomorrow. How busy can the human calendar get? These articles of journalistic gossip have eventually usurped the dual sovereignties of common decency and social order. The Ghanaian press cannot even boast consistently of a semblance of syndemic journalism, when aggregate daily reportage on social and political issues emanating from the internal organization of the country’s mainstream media through human spoken outlets, have more negative items than encouraging news, it seems, to sell to a willing public, partisan political readership for the most part.

It is not as if many of these journalistic outpourings lack basis in fact. Quite the contrary. It is just that they seem to share the prophetic trademark of Nostradamus. Or of the books of Daniel, Ezekiel, and Jeremiah. Or better yet, the Book of Revelation. However, media houses and the organizations of professional hands directing the social image of reportage in any body politic are not entirely culpable in the enterprise of news reporting when a positive piece of news item, for instance, gets slanted interpretively according to the strategic political rigidities of public prejudices. Nonetheless, bad news is simply bad news and good news is simply good news. There is no other way around this gnomic realism given the temperamental irreplaceability of the two, with both demonstrating concurrent moments of temperamental possibilities only in another interesting context, an Orwellian political set-up. Journalism is indeed a matter of life and blood, the moral soul of a society.

Significantly, problem arises if and when the media exploit public psychology for monetary gain and partisan political advantage at the holistic expense of truth, educating the public, and directing the hand of social justice toward the cynosure of public grievances. Moreover, the moral utility of the mediating hand of journalism in linking up the aggregate consciences of individuals of a community to each other in graphic symbolisms of socialization and neighborliness and then to the partisan political quintessence of their government, through the proactive agency of unitary consciousness where the exclusivity of national interest assumes tactical precedence over other policy decisions, is not to be taken as a light matter, a question of moral inconsequentiality. In principle, the mediating hand of journalism underwrites mutual knowledge of a government and consequently of its subjects, simultaneously informing each, the government and the masses, of a working commonality of interests deemed conducive to the accommodating contours of development economics. It is an interesting point of fact that journalism can unmake a budding democracy if its excesses are not brought within the controlling limits of social or constitutional oversight.

Equally journalism can be usefully potent in progressive one-part democracies like China’s, the so-called Beijing Consensus. Consequently, we argue that responsible journalism constitutes one of the powerful pillars of liberal democracy even though no such radical idea truly exists anywhere, at least not on this planet of ours. Let us quickly append a footnote to our theoretic claims before embarking on a discursive diversion: The last statement stems from our intimate knowledge of “universal” instances where the totalized praxes of democratization are clinically examined piecemeal under the rational microscope of empirical certification. Thus we assert that the indistinct soul of democracy has the brilliant spirit of theory, the concrete letter of praxis. It says therefore that political democracy and media democracy go hand in hand in the socializing milieu of mature political expression. It also says evolution of any society is contingent in part on how well-informed its citizens generally are. There is no two ways about it.

On the contrary, impediments to a well-informed public include, but not limited to, journalistic and political lies, illiteracy and aliteracy, weak or compromised institutions, social gullibility, among others. It does imply that responsible journalism can at least inoculate public psychology against the spectral incursion of social gullibility into a body politic where that body politic in question overlaps with a wide readership republic. If that is indeed directly or remotely the case, one is left to wonder where the tonic source of the average Ghanaian’s incapacitating gullibility is located! This question may partly be tied to the proliferating ornamentation of irresponsible journalism in the breathing-space of public psychology. It is within reason when cultural critics say it is painfully disheartening to see social decay and moral malignancy make rampant encroachment upon the body politic only to be matched by feints of popular apathy. Sincerely, we are not inciting public psychology to take to the anarchy of the Arab Spring as a radical approach to seeking redress of social grievances, however one looks at the Arab Spring as a gargantuan moral failure, objectively speaking.

That represents just one of the many unintended, even intended, debits of revolutions, moral or otherwise. Theocracy, shariah, intolerance, male chauvinism and patriarchy, social retrogression, gender inequality, caliphate autocracy, and de-civilization have replaced the culture of relative freedom in the wake of the Arab Spring. Ghana’s 1966 putschism begot one military dictatorship after other until the country eventually found herself in developmental doldrums. Of course Ghana’s 1966 coup d’etat was never a moral revolution. That coup d’etat was designed to bring back colonialism and George Orwell’s “Animal Farm” and black racial inferiority. In fact Orwellian “Animal Farm,” the so-called winner-takes-all political syndrome, persists today. Indeed the Orwellian “Animal Farm” politics has proved impossible to uproot from its soil of constitutional dictatorship. Yet Ghanaians claim to enjoy free democratic expression under a dilapidated umbrella of constitutional dictatorship.

Yet the culture of freedom, exclusive of the accommodating reciprocity of moral accountability, can equally put a progressive society on the brink of social degradation. Social proaction, wakeful institutional oversight, and responsible journalism can reverse some of these negative tendencies, except that Ghana’s constitutional dictatorship does not give free expression to these sentiments in any meaningful way. What can be done? Journalism can be deployed to put Ghana’s constitutional dictatorship on public trial pending its political evisceration for the sake of political pluralism. But journalism does not exist in a vacuum. Neither does it operate in relative isolation. Journalism is an institution onto itself, an institutional octopus with inquiring arms dug deep in every facet of human existence. In one sense, journalism represents one of the many quintessential souls of public psychology. In another sense, journalism is an institution with compartmentalized interests, all tailored to the imperatives of social organization. In that instance journalism is more or less the cockpit of social psychology.

What is the point? The recent public convulsion following on the heels of media disclosure of massive internal corruption in the National Service Secretariat is an excellent case study. However this interesting case undeniably proves one thing: That it is not always the case that public corruption constitutes an exclusive attraction for incumbency. Corruption runs the entire gamut of social stratification. It is however gullibly tempting to identify managers of the state with questionable elements attached to the constitution of the highest echelon of public accountability. Until the people see political corruption as violence perpetrated against them by the political elites, however, nothing worthwhile will come out of society’s demands for positive change. “I despise violence,” notes Assata Shakur. “But I despise it even more when it is one-sided and used to oppress and repress poor people.” As a matter of fact, it is only when the people view corruption as “violence” against their persons that they can truly marshal their moral instruments of self-defense against it.

There is a strong argument to be made in support of the preceding contention. The political elites have indeed made the people systemically poor by their continuous plundering of state coffers. This is economic violence of the highest order, which is also repressive, oppressive, and one-sided. Thus a people that fail to do anything about crimes commissioned in their name technically become accessory to the crimes. In other words, any such people that witness thieves steal from society and thereby remain nonchalant become complicit in public corruption. It turns out the only tool at the people’s disposal to wield against political corruption, alas, is their franchise, which they can only exercise at four-year intervals. This franchise, together with their conscience, many have sold to the same criminal politicians for pittance, politicians given oversight designation by public mandate in protection of the public interest. Yet it does not take that long for corrupt politicians to amass illegal wealth. Pen and ink have more stealing power than chronological expression in the political idiom of Ghanaian democracy.

Those in possession of these magical political pens replete with ink, no matter the color of the ink, in high places and also know how best to apply them make kleptocracy possible. Ghanaian democracy merely uses electoral politics or franchise as a means to a gracious end, kleptocracy. Regrettably, the concept “accountability” is such a difficult concept to define in precise moral terms given its flowing nebulosity and mercurial tendencies in Ghana’s shifting political culture. Transparency and probity are the two other imprecise constructs. Ghana therefore pushes herself asymptotically toward the cloudy heart of Orwellian certainty in the absence of any precise institutional definitions of these concepts. Further, mutual invocation of moral equalization, an exercise of political expedience mediated through the cracked lens of partisan politics in respect of public disclosures of corruption and gross mismanagement of national wealth, by both opposition and incumbency adds to the layered conundrum of definitional cloudiness.

Of course corruption lacks political or social complexion in any context. Corruption also lacks the moral genetics of ethnicity and race, implying that its existential phenotype potentially cuts through the connecting rigidities of social particularities with the relative ease of a hot sharp knife’s passage through a frigid block of butter. Corruption does not betray any particular sense of attachment to partisan politics. It even has the power to defy the moral authority of God. Such is the stubbornly nebulous personality of corruption. Thus, chasing after the source of corruption can become as evasive as the Higgs boson. That is not different from saying the source of corruption is everywhere trapped in the enabling embodiment of a country’s aggregate effeminate institutions. This observation may assume a practical kaleidoscope of social realities: “Unspoken” as in cultural norms; “invisible” as in statutes and constitutions; “visible” as in police uniform, judge’s robe, indictment, and imprisonment; and so on. Stated differently, laws are not merely public marriages between papers and ink mediated through human psychology.

The story is more complex than that. Laws can express themselves through any of the media we have mentioned in the preceding paragraph. We have to be careful here. We are not saying that police uniform, say, is law onto itself, far from it. We are rather saying police uniform is an expression of statutory or constitutional mandate via human agency where both, human agency and police uniform, act in concert in the public interest in two contexts: Preventing crimes in particular and protecting social order in general. Alas the institutional scourge of bribery, judicial unfairness, and social nonchalance have scandalized external expressions of the law to the point where physical police presence and prospect of individuals going to prison exert no force of moral conviction whatsoever in public consciousness. Apparently lack of enforcing existing laws as well as of making example of criminals tend to inactivate the potential of institutions to exert their corrective influence on society, thus imbuing Ghanaian laws with the enervate essence of mannequins. These laws have the power of placebos at best. As it is these are positions we simply cannot overemphasize.

Consequently there is no point looking elsewhere for one’s face when that face, an unrepentant and ugly one at that, is right there within one’s purview. In another related context Malawi has given us a classic exemplar of judicial justice worth localizing in or adapting to the Ghanaian situation. This regards the public trial and subsequent sentencing of Traza Namathanga Senzani, a former employee of Malawi’s Ministry of Tourism, who, together with no less than seventy others, the Malawi High Court accused of stealing $30m from the government in a high-profile scandal that rocked the country to its moral core. Could the Malawian example be replicated in Ghana? That remains to be seen in the wake of explosive scandals rocking the nation in recent times. Meanwhile, dangerous Ghanaian political criminals walk free all the time on streets made of gold because in Ghana’s shifting political culture, the epoch of the winner-takes-all political syndrome, these high-profile political criminals are untouchable celebrities, are worshipped as demigods.

What makes the Malawian case unique? Enforcement of her laws. Ghana, on the other hand, exists on a different planet where doublespeak and doublethink live side by side. Men and women of conscience are yet to locate that planet. In Ghana, deterrence and enforcement are rare commodities in high-profile situations where the political criminology of Ghana’s winner-takes-all political syndrome is definition of incumbent expression and power. No wonder the culture of impunity has come to replace institutional impotence and constitutional inaction in the popular commissioning of white-collar crimes, even worming its way into public psychology. This is where the moral importance and proaction of collaborative, citizen, and civic journalists come in handy. There is no denying the fact that unbridled public tolerance for criminality is part of the proliferating tendency of anomie and thus a scorch on the national conscience.

We may, however, have to add that journalists should give the people a platform of neighborliness where the people are finally able to give full expression to the political idiom of social justice, ultimately stoking the embers of the kind of moral revolution required to overthrow the autocracy of social injustice in the body politic. Accordingly journalists should avoid being paid agent saboteurs of political parties or politicians in the public interest. Rather, they should learn to speak for the national conscience in a language that directly appeals to the awry consciences of politicians, realigning the latter with the popular aspirations of the people and human dignity. It bears to keep in mind that the circle of social justice begins and ends with the people in the transforming bosom of national organization. And “circle” because paths leading to truth and social justice have no beginning and no end in the finite possibilities of human psychology. The word “circle” also implies the totality of resources which a people bring to bear on finding a common ground to address their disparate collective problems with direct implications for national organization.

It is also not out of the question that public corruption represents the pockmarked face of national disintegration. It is clearly the case that Ghana’s welfare or social programs designed to reduce poverty are not sustainable or are barely functional partly because of a mixture of variables, including, but not limited to, poor management skills, greed, and corruption on the part of public officials. The people do not have to be repeatedly told their greatest enemy is political corruption and corruption across the board. Thus, the Caesar of corruption has to be violently overthrown regardless of the turbulent weather of political opposition. Ghanaian politicians have given the people enough already by way of the texture and color of their political hair and what they publicly bear on their head, managerial cluelessness. Ghanaian politicians have also consistently demonstrated to the people now and then how empty their cranial capacities are. It is now the turn of the people to show the world what stuff their cranial capacities are made of.

Assata Shakur correctly notes: “People are right when they say it is not what you have on your head but what you have in it.” What do the people have in their heads that are being allowed to go to waste even as their wicked politicians take them for a ride? Is the collective voice of the people no longer the voice of moral authority? Surely it is. This voice of moral authority must surely translate into vigorous political action in stark opposition to Ghana’s entrenched kleptomania and abysmal leadership. The quest for moral equality must begin now! Let us leave you with Assata Shakur: “Everything is a lie in America, and the thing that keeps it going is that so many people believe the lie.”

Replace America with Ghana and see what you get!

We shall return…