When a Nation Loses its Soul

Pardon me, dear reader, for my long silence, but I have been away on a visit to the Motherland where a combination of factors, not excluding the ubiquitous “Dum so”, denied me access to civilisation to the extent that I could not even say “hi” to you my esteemed readers. Moreover, some of the depressing happenings in our dear country mean I am yet to shake myself back to life.

My observations about nearly every facet of life in Ghana are not pretty. We really need to do something about our country because it's on the brink of losing its soul, if it has not done so already. Indeed, any country that intentionally teaches any form of depravity to its children has lost its soul and does not deserve to be counted among the comity of nations!

After the 2014 Basic Education Certificate Examinations, two children were shown on television, one telling the whole world that “our teachers collected monies from us to be given to the invigilators, so they could look the other way as teachers called out the answers to us.” My English friend who recorded the clip could not believe her ears and wanted to know if that child and or his teachers had been questioned by the police. I could only bow my head and make unintelligible noises. As sure as night follows day, nothing happened to the teachers, the invigilators, the minister responsible for the department or even the examining body whose head is supposed to be a minster of the gospel!

Not surprisingly, several question papers of the 2015 examination were said to have been sold and re-sold openly in markets, street corners and petrol stations, among other places, just as justice is now sold in government bungalows, public parks and street corners.

It is almost certain that this disgraceful debauchery was perpetrated by the nouveau riche in society – the political appointees, their “25% brown envelope” collaborators and the Customs and Excise and other tax cheats. In the end the lot fell on the poor kids and the poorest of the poor in society, to pay for the dishonesty and criminality of these hoodlums. The children had to re-write three papers in a single day!

In some rural communities, children have to travel long distances to write their examinations at designated “Examination Centres.” Some parents have to scrape the bottom of the barrel, to rent very rudimentary accommodation for their children over the period of the examinations. So with very short notice for the re-writing of the examination papers, many of those parents are now indebted to landlords for the foreseeable future. Meanwhile those are the areas with very poor quality staffing in schools, areas where, with no chance in hell of anyone getting illegal access to the papers, whole districts regularly score zero percent at these examinations. A case of “heads I win, tails you lose.”

In my travels, I came across a teacher who had to flee a paramountcy somewhere in Ghana because he would not agree to the community's brazen plan for his school to pass on answers to the children or actually contract older people to write the examinations for the candidates in order “to improve the image of the district.”

The real stinker was to be revealed in the school placements of the candidates. In my time, when you sat the Common Entrance Examination, West African Examination Council simply sent your results to your chosen schools. I received three admission offers because each one of my choices deemed my results to be good enough for admission. Today, I would not have a dog's chance in hell, to attend the prestigious Girls' School I attended, considering where I was born!

In 2015, the placements are supposed to be computerised, but the stench of that process can revive a dead goat. I came across a young girl who scored aggregate 8 in the examination but couldn't find her name on any school's list at the first instance. Because of our abject computer illiteracy and ignorance, the computer has been made into a super human, somewhere between the “mensa society“ and angels— the computer overpaid you, the computer misplaced your application, the computer is not bringing up your name—sheer arrant nonsense! Even so-called IT gurus do not seem to know anything about “GIGO, garbage in garbage out.” Every case of clear ineptitude is blamed on the computer.

The so-called “computer placement” nonsense is another devious scheme that has been devised by our dunderhead leaders to fleece poor Ghanaians. In the end, all that mechanisation is by-passed in favour of their dishonest “protocol” admission scam.

In one popular Girls' School in the Central Region, admission places were going for GHC 2,500 apiece, placements in other schools, particularly the good girls' schools with limited places, were going for equally outrageous figures. If anybody disputes this claim, I will challenge them to organise snap examinations in Mathematics and English, supervised by an independent body, in all the girls' schools in Ghana.

Train up a child in the way he should go: and when he is old, he will not depart from it (Proverbs 22:6, KJV). We have taken bribes from unborn babies, dead bodies and the comatose, who do not count, and have now stooped to the level of selling examination papers and school places to thirteen and fourteen year olds. How do we expect these children to grow up into any decent human beings? Someone said, “If you train your lawyers in Mokola Market, why wouldn't they sell justice?” The pun very much intended. If children finish and end their basic education with buying examination papers and secondary school places, what does anyone expect them to do when they become bank managers and customs officers?

I have just been sent a WhatsApp clip in which a lady (must be in her early twenties), with big butts and thinly-clad, literally teaching what must be an eight or nine year boy to have sex with her in public, as other adults cheer them on! In a society that encourages such depravity, is it any wonder that ten year olds are having children willy-nilly? The song in the clip is in the Ga language and from the surroundings, I suspect that the clip was recorded somewhere in the Greater Accra Region. And to think that we have a string of national institutions aimed at protecting children and the most vulnerable in society – a whole ministry dedicated to gender and children's issues, a department of Social Welfare, a Ministry of Youth and Sports? I believe we have somewhere in our capital named “Sodom and Gomorrah,” but has it really come to that?

Making our leaders work for the people
In my posting of 28^th April, entitled, “Do African Leaders Love Africa?” I posited that, “It is worth highlighting that Nigeria has shown the way. Will others follow? Any African president (that is what most of them are) who fails to improve upon the lives of his or her people in their first term in office must be thrown out at the next election. If we could make one-term presidents of these failing leaders in the next twenty years, perhaps, African leaders will begin to take their people much more seriously than they have done thus far. This realisable goal may very well beat a shiny track out of the morass of bad leadership and governance in which we seem to be perpetually stuck.”

President John Dramani Mahama of Ghana fits the bill. He does not deserve one more hour in office after his term—luckily extended by default—ends in December 2016! I don't care who takes over from him. The man must go to the pits he has sunk Ghana into. Oman Ghana needs to recover its soul. We may have another group of rogues for four years, but if we throw them out after every four years, they will begin to sit up and take their responsibilities more seriously, instead of the current state of open sewer of corruption, create, loot and share with cronies and family.

I shall return with my beaded gourd, God willing.

Naana Ekua Eyaaba has an overarching interest in the development of the African continent and Black issues in general. Having travelled extensively through Africa, the Black communities of the East Coast of the United States as well as London and Leeds (United Kingdom), she enjoys reading, and writes when she is irritated, and edits when she is calm. You can email her at [email protected] , or read her blog at https://naanaekuaeyaaba.wordpress.com/.