Veteran Lawyer and member of the Council of State, Sam Okudzeto, has said “Ghanaians have short memory” and as a result lack the habit of record keeping and proper documentation of historical events that took place in the country.
According to him, this poses the problem of making referrals in an attempt to state factual events because information was not chronicled stored and the citizens soon forget.
“We do not keep documents and that is part of a problem some of us keep complaining about all the time. To say that the Ghanaian has short memory. They don’t keep record. Something you see in the newspaper a week ago, if you are telling somebody he will say it’s not true and then when you ask why is that record not being kept nobody understands it,” he stated.
Sam Okudzeto made the above mention at the premiere of the ‘Election Petition’ documentary shown at the Accra International Conference Centre (AICC) on Wednesday January 24, 2018.
Election Petition is a documentary thriller based on the true political story from the leading democracy in Africa, Ghana. It is the story of the massive legal challenge that was mounted to an election to elect the President of the country.
The former president of the Ghana Bar Association, averred that major events such as the landmark ruling in the eight-month long prolonged tussle at the Supreme Court over the validity of the presidential results in the 2012 polls should be chronicled to enable future generations appreciate and have a knowledge of Ghana’s political development over the years.
He strongly recommended History as a compulsory subject in Senior High Schools (SHS) especially to give students a good grounding on how the nation has progressed.
“To me History should be a compulsory subject. Whether you are a Mathematician or a Scientist, you’re a Geographer or whatever you studied. You must still study History because it gives you a grounding to know how the nation has moved.”
“...Have we made progress, have we not retarded….why are people so much unemployed when we have so much natural resources in abundance. These are things that have to be geographically recorded so that we all begin to now understand,” Okudzeto ardently uttered.
The 82-year-old legal practitioner said the outcome equips the individual to “know how to vote because sometimes we vote just by sentiments without facts. But we all need to understand so that when you are going to polls you know that okay this government has performed well I will repeat them. This one has not performed well, let’s vote them out.”
The documentary of the epic legal battle between President Nana Akufo-Addo, then NPP Flagbearer and the opposition National Democratic Congress was produced by SOAS and Spursand directed by Ace Journalist and host of Good Evening Ghana show, Paul Adom-Otchere.
