TALKING: The Ghanaian paradox

In the last three months, I have been involved in ethnographic and archival research. Implicitly, I have been less engaged in political and social issues. But I do not miss the opportunity to follow popular and academic debates on vexatious topics in the country. Sometimes I get depressed when I listen to our social and political commentators misinforming the public deliberately.

After years of listening to our social and political commentators and our public intellectuals, I see Ghana as a paradox paradox. Ghana embodies a particular paradox that hinders the building of a nation. We have a kind of paradox that puts us relentlessly on the path of damaging criticism. We are people who criticize almost everything.

We have a predilection to talk about topics for which we are hardly informed. I see many of our commentators talking about all issues as if they had been sacralized and promoted to the level of the omniscient God. Commentators from all over the world and the men and women of the corresponding media have always defined the program to be followed by all Ghanaians. In journalism, the debate revolved around the question of who defines the agenda: the public or the media?

If there is no point in splitting hairs on this issue, it is important to note that the type of conversations we have about our media – print and electronic – is a tacit expression of our aspirations and our socialization. Our aspirations are to see Ghana come out of the doldrums of the fundamental challenges of life. This reflects our nature as a creature particularly well. God has placed a sense of order in us and we find ourselves demobilized when we see the disorder.

The Bible informs us that human beings have been placed in a flawless garden that has everything they need to feed themselves. The lack was not a language in the garden of Eden. It shows how God etched a certain teleological framework in us. Based on the meaning of the TV, journalists cliche that "the good news is not selling, but not the bad." It's also precisely because God has created and invested only good things – thus streamlining his creative addendum: "And it was good." That also explains why we reject all that is bad .

From this point of view, the belligerent way we discussed the residue ofdumso ' lately is understood. We understand the anxiety we express about floods that kill people. We are also aware that the carnage on our roads makes us turn our heads. All this shows that the ultimate reality has created in us a sense of order. It is on this principle that I share the opinion of Thomas Aquinas when he appealed to the ontological tendency of the cosmos as one of the five reasons for the existence of God.

However, the challenge I have to face is that Ghana has reached the point where I can only subscribe to our venerable James Emman Kwegyir Aggrey that "talking is not expensive. We have become so cynical and talkative that we condemn everything our political leaders do. It is not necessary to be a singer or a griot when it comes to building a nation, but it seems that we have spoken for a point of absurdity. The worrying trend is that most of those who comment on certain issues are the most ignorant of the subject.

In the context of the social contract we have with the political elites, the government absolutely must not be protected from constructive criticism. Working with a nation equates to Akan's prescribed saying that "anyone who creates a path can hardly realize that his back is crooked." This is because of our propensity to fool ourselves which explains the need for a neat attitude. opposition.

Unfortunately, what we are seeing is an opposition that has been baptized to oppose it. Every opposition party specializes in damaging criticism. The New Patriotic Party (NPP), when it was in opposition, was critical of virtually everything the National Democratic Party (NDC) was doing. Now, it is the NDC that took the position of a party on the periphery. They sharpened their resolve to defeat any NPP policy.

Therefore, we live in a country where patriotism is directed to a political party rather than to the Ghanaian nation. We live in a country where political parties run the nation in accordance with its philosophy, regardless of the extent to which such a divisive and destructive philosophy can affect the nation.

Since I began searching the archives, I realized the historical antecedent of partisanship in our national discourses. For example, membership in the People's Party of the Convention, founded in June 1949, was considered supreme over that of the nation. Granted, if you had a chef who personified Ghana, we could not expect less. The vicious and malicious policy started with the propaganda of the PCP. The blackmail of the CPP on some of the key players in Ghana's political history has fueled discussions on the history curriculum of our schools.

In 2006, one of my history teachers at the University of Cape Coast asked us if the abbreviation "J.B" (Danquah) was well expressed. Unfortunately, over 80% of the clbad misunderstood the answer. Some of my friends who bitterly criticize the inclusion of Joseph Kwame Kyeretwie Boakye Danquah in Ghana's historical narrative were the same ones who were asking for the inclusion of Ghana's history in our program. I am fortunate to have been educated and interacted with some of the experts who drafted the program. I can say that even if one or two of them have a latent affiliation with a particular political party, I have no reason to believe that they have outsourced their expertise to the benefit of partisanship .

I know for sure that most people condemning the new curriculum know almost nothing about Ghana's history or development. Most of them comment because their sacred duty is to follow the logic of their party. Most so-called Ghanaian civil societies have also mortgaged their political neutrality in their dialogue with national discourses. I am not oblivious to the fact that neutrality in the ontological sense is an illusory fantasy. But I dare say that most of our civil societies have become deeply partisan that it was not possible to trust them to make an "objective" badysis of national policies. Some of them have become a cymbal of noisemakers. They have become so partisan that they criticize more than politicians. Either they claim to know everything or they deliberately distort the government's policy.

As a paradoxical nation, we are proposing a solution to all the challenges that the country faces without blinking. The cacophony of noises is such that most people speak badly, very little think seriously. Unfortunately, the majority of those who talk unnecessarily overwhelm those who pursue critical thinking.

The predisposition to speak is influenced by our Akan definition of democracy, narrow and self-imposed: "Speak, let me also speak. speak continuously (foolish). Since discussions are expensive, our pursuit of development has become a race in the red: we declaim, sweat, but we make no progress in overcoming the colonial and postcolonial legacies of underdevelopment.

Due to the brutality of our politics, I know brilliant academics who have consciously refused to take part in a public speech. They prefer to stay in the Ivory Tower to publish in international journals for promotional purposes. In Plato Republicwe are told that philosophical kings should not be involved in mundane things in life that could interfere with their ability to think. This is because thinking requires calm and a little isolation. This has been illustrated in the lives of all the prophets, gurus, monks, and Sufis of the major religions of the world: they have all moved away from the cacophony of noises whenever they wanted to think.

The reason for the useless conversation in Ghana is that we hardly hold people responsible for spitting out garbage and inanity. We went beyond the limits of freedom of expression beyond what Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill, two key libertarians, could have imagined. We have reached what Isaiah Berlin has called negative freedom. Our ancestors informed us that "mistakes never fail in incessant words". Indeed, as long as we do not accept people for their misleading comments on national issues, Ghana will remain a paradox.

Satyagraha
Charles Prempeh ([email protected]), African University College of Communication, Accra