Likening Ghana To The Hobbesian Jungle

You cannot read Leviathan and not feel that Hobbes, who wrote in the 17th century, was in fact musing about Ghanaian society today. We live in a Hobbesian jungle, where everyman is for himself and the concept of the common good has become totally alien. We blatantly expropriate public property for private use, so long as it is possible to get away with it, and it often is.

This applies equally to the elite who divide up public properties among themselves to build private monstrosities behind 10-foot walls, and the very poor who take over highways, swampy areas for building and overpasses to make building blocks or set up trading kiosks or tap directly into street lamps for their electricity.

In such a state, there is no law that anyone is willing to obey. The state itself is considered illegitimate. Force and fraud are the two driving forces. Individuals arrange for their own security, their own electricity, their own water; every home is like a private local government. What we need is taken, in complete disregard of any rules. Hobbes calls this chaotic free-for-all a state of war, the very heart of our darkness.

It is an entirely unpredictable place, and everyone plans only for the short term. Let us listen to Hobbes: "In such condition there is no place for industry, because the fruit thereof is uncertain; and consequently no culture of the earth; no navigation, nor use of the commodities that may be imported by sea; no commodious building; no instruments of moving and removing such things as require much force; no knowledge of the face of the earth; no account of time; no arts; no letters; no society; and which is worst of all, continual fear, and the danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short."

Now the language of the 17th Century transplanted to today may sound a bit melodramatic. But I think that, in its essentials, it offers a useful way of understanding the underlying forces that have made Ghana such a chaotic society, to wit: a virtual absence of a legitimate authority that governs the country's affairs primarily for the common good, as opposed to catering to the wretched excess of the elite and its elaborate rituals of pompous self-importance.

Africa-Ghana can't grow unless we stand up to oppressors. Good men and women sit on the sidelines waiting for a change to occur from the skies. We must participate fully to ride ourselves of the Hobbesian style of rule which exists in our dear Ghana today. Wake up and be accounted for. What happened to the social contract?

NANA OFORI OWUSU
PPP MP CANDIDATE FOR EFFUTU CONSTITUENCY