There are certain news items that give one the impression that we are still living in the very dark days of yore. In those days, it was easy to hear stories of communities lynching thieves (or alleged thieves), mobs going berserk and getting up to all kinds of mayhem, and stuff like that.
When I read some of the news items that emerge of late, I am drawn back to those dark days, days we should have left behind many decades ago.
My mind went back to the days of yore when I read the shocking news item about one Ansah, who had been beaten to death and publicly burned at the instigation of a fetish priest.
My immediate reaction was that this is a typical news item that can only come out of a ‘shithole country’. Yes, we live in a shithole country, a banana republic indeed.
Yes, it is only in a banana republic that we would watch and allow fraudsters to go about calling themselves men and women of God and describing themselves as angels to dupe the unsuspecting public.
Yes, it is only in a shithole country, a banana republic, that we would allow people to be lynching other people with the claim that the lynched can cause penises to disappear.
I have stated this before, and as things stand, I have no doubt that I will state this again; we should take off the suits and stop attending international fora masquerading we belong to the modern era of leadership. We don’t!
We don’t, if in our country, it is possible for people to be so ignorant that they can believe that it is possible to be killed through ‘spiritual’ means.
We don’t, if we allow chiefs to hold court and to banish, yes, actually banish other citizens from their towns and villages.
That is what happened to the man, Ansah. In the year of our Lord 2024, he was a man who was living with banishment, by a chief!
Ansah’s case is symptomatic of a gradual canker in our country, which, sooner or later, we are going to have to confront. This is a canker that our politicians and media have actively cultivated in recent times, the phenomenon that Chiefs control the land and area over which they are chiefs. They don’t. The land is controlled by the civil government. It is policed by the civil government. And administration of justice is at the hands of the civil government.
Recently, we heard the incident where a chief claimed that he would not allow goats to be reared in his domain. This piece of crassness was immediately copied by several towns and villages. Indeed, even as I write this piece, goats are becoming more and more endangered in many communities.
As I write this piece, it has now become the fashion for chiefs to order that whole towns and metropolis shut down, over, believe it or not, funerals. Apparently, when ‘royal’ people die in Ghana, it is sinful to engage in trade. It does not matter that every single item that would be used in the burial and funeral of the royal, would be something that is bought from a shop.
We are retrogressing as a people, in our unnatural desire to go back to practices we abandoned decades ago.
And our political class actively encourage this retrogression, in the mistaken belief that it leads to votes. The consequence is that we are actually banishing citizens and setting them alight in public squares.
Barbaric! Please, let us take off the English-cut suits, because the suits constitute just a thin veneer to our true nature. Just behind the cloth, we are just cavemen, buy creating a creating a society that is very quickly retrogressing.
Indeed, otherwise, we would have a nation where we can have a police that responds quickly and effectively, when mobs get out of hand. We would have a society where chiefs would know that they cannot hold court and pronounce banishments, jail sentences, not to speak of death sentences.
We would not have chiefs who would dare state that they have banished citizens from their own towns.
We have set Ghana down a slippery slope with our unnecessary patronage of certain unacceptable practices, some of which are not even cultural, and unless we take immediate steps to pause and step back from this slope, we would witness even greater atrocities.
Let us take off the suits, and begin to work to create a true, modern democracy citizens can be safe in!
