|
Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...
|
By Isaac Ato Mensah
Accra – 26 March, 2020
History tells us that during the 1948 riots, colonial subjects directed protesters away from disrupting a polo match between Europeans and Africans.
A group of our forebears were retreating from the Christiansborg Cross Roads demonstration where three ex servicemen had been shot, and this group angry at the colonialists got to the Old Polo Grounds opposite the Supreme Court building.
There, Africans prevented their fellow subjects from disrupting the polo match.
Were our educated forebears selfish, weak or brainwashed?
No, they were educated, enlightened and principled.
As a matter of fact, the Gold Coast intelligentsia, political class and merchants, or any other group for that matter, never organized a riotous mayhem anywhere in the colony.
The ex servicemen had also given the colonial authorities advance notice of their unarmed orderly match after several formal written notices about their entitlements following WWII were ignored.
So why is it so difficult for our current leaders to organize the masses?
As my mentor always asks: “How many university degrees did Ghanaians have at independence?”
Any way you slice it – university degrees per population quota then and now, travelling experience per population quota then and now, whatever – our current leaders and their minions are certainly not up to the mark.
Already, there is water shortage everywhere, so why are the leaders afraid of declaring a lockdown?
Do you want people to go about infecting everyone else not just with COVID-19, but all the other infectious diseases in the name of fetching water?
My mentor again: “Since ghana first recorded cholera in the 1970s, the disease has become entrenched. There is nothing like a ‘cholera season’. It is always here.”
So why the reluctance to institute and enforce a lockdown?
Why are our paid officials still allowing the masses to queue at public toilets?
Again, with all the power cuts, do the poor suddenly need refrigerators to store food before a lockdown can be announced?
Has India with 500 COVID-19 cases – which translates into 12 ghana cases on account of our smaller population, not instituted a lockdown?
Since when did India become a Western country?
And what about Rwanda, Morocco and South Africa all of which have instituted lockdowns?
Simply referring to African context and solutions appears to be a perennial excuse for retrogressive behavior from the chronic woeful underachievers.
From 1982, following the controversial Rawlings coup d’etat, we unjustifiably slept three years under a curfew – another word for the same lockdown – mostly from “six to six”, coming out only 12 hours a day.
More recently, northern ghana, following communal clashes, has thrived under intermittent curfews.
So whither the cowardice and propaganda?
We ought to follow the science, and adopt international best practice, in order to contain COVID-19, the virus causing this global pandemic.
And we should learn to present our arguments with intellectual clarity.
But no, instead our current leaders insist on chains of university degrees and unleashing their vociferous hirelings onto the public discourse arena to tell us that a lockdown will not be in our interest.
Indeed, if there is no coronavirus disease, are we going to continue business as usual, thanking God for sparing ghana?
On Wednesday, many of the radio and TV stations devoted their airtime to the government sponsored day of “fasting and prayer”, and to orient the masses that the coronavirus disease was caused by “sasabonsam”, the devil.
“The group that the colonialists feared most was the educated folk,” stated a senior citizen recently, pointing her right finger into the text before us. “It was never the chiefs as many will have us believe.”
And how many educated folk back then?
They did not control university administration, nor the legislature, nor the judiciary nor the commanding heights of industry.
Yet with 94 COVID-19 cases and four deaths so far, all the best practices, learning and knowledge freely available online are all lost on us.
Now my mentor gasps daily in exasperation: “These morons will GET US ALL KILLED!”, adding “My patience is for my patients, I am under oath and will always fight to preserve their lives”.
Feedback; [email protected]; www.writersghana.com; LinkedIn, Isaac Ato Mensah; Instagram, @atomenswriters; Twitter, @Atomens; Facebook, Writers and Shakespeares Ghana; Telegram, Isaac Ato Mensah; Quora, Isaac Ato Mensah. WhatsApp (+233) 020 022 0353.
Writers and Shakespeares Ghana Limited exist to be a moral and intellectual guide to the best practice of PR and integrated communications around the world, beginning with Ghana.