By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.
Garden City, New York
July 1, 2015
E-mail: [email protected]
When I read the report in which he was alleged to have said this, I could only shake my head in knowing amusement of the kind sharply verging on contempt. My people never learn any meaningful lessons from life, or do they? I huffed to myself. This is not the first time that any prominent Ghanaian leader is making such a lame proposition. They are often religious leaders of the so-called mainline churches. Initially, such calls regarded the need for the name of Ghana to revert back to the old British colonial name of Gold Coast, almost as if the mere renaming of the country would be the solution to all the largely socioeconomic, political, cultural and psychological problems facing the nation.
It clearly appeared that those proposing the name change psychologically had the minds of some emancipated slaves who had suddenly realized that the great responsibility that came with sovereignty was too overwhelming to be boldly embraced and fiercely accepted with pride and a resolute sense of purpose. They never bothered to reckon the fact of whose "Gold Coast" the British designation of modern Ghana represented. They simply wanted out of the present untold mess but, somehow, either woefully lacked the cranial capacity to do so, or were simply too intellectually lazy to take the proverbial bull by the horn. And so they craved a return of European colonial rule, even while they vigorously protested the raw exposure of their motives.
This was the painful feeling that surged through my veins and up my spine, when I came across the brief news item captioned "Ghana Requires A Revolutionary Leader - Methodist Bishop" Kasapafmonline.com / Ghanaweb.com 6/9/15), in which the Methodist Bishop of the Kumasi Diocese was reported to have said that Ghana needed "a charismatic leader who will spearhead a revolution in the handling of issues of the environment." Maybe Rev.-Prof. Safo-Kantanka was not yet born or, perhaps, he was out of the country when Chairman Jerry John Rawlings launched his so-called House-Cleaning Exercise in June 1979 and again, on December 31, 1981, the Tribal-Butchers' Revolution that launched his eleven-and-half year reign-of-terror, which in turn launched him into an eight-year and two-term faux-democratic leadership.
What we need presently is a globally enlightened Ghanaian leader who is on the cutting-edge of environmental protection and rural-development issues. The problems facing Ghana, as well as many Third-World countries, so-called, are multi-fronted, and the environment is only one crucial facet of these problems. There are equally significant others, such as labor and employment development, energy and foresighted and effective administration of our capital resources. If, indeed, as Bishop Safo-Kantanka maintains, the bane of our nation's problems is attitudinal, and that Ghanaians need "mental" or "psychological" re-orientation, then, of course, the most effective way of tackling this "bane" is to reconfigure the way Ghanaian children and young adults are educated.
The curricula of our schools and colleges ought to be redesigned, as well as our teaching methods, in order to achieve the desired outcomes. The churches also have to be actively engaged in this process, both at the curricular level, since the greater percentage of our schools and colleges are church-sponsored, as well as the way in which Biblical messages are disseminated. In particular, our church leaders ought to practice what they preach, in terms of leading exemplary lives. This, of course, goes for all the other non-Christian religious establishments as well. The maxim that "The apple does not fall far from its parent-tree" could not apply more in this context.
Indeed, the problem that Bishop Safo-Kantanka is talking about here did not begin today. It evolved with the conscious and inadvertent complicity of all Ghanaian citizens. And this basic recognition is the pre-requisite to a fuller knowledge of ourselves as a society. It is also the basis on which we can begin to do serious development thinking.
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