COVID-19 Should Change Africa's Legal System For Better

Once upon a time, a wolf, the cunning beast my native Goka people call Pataku, clothed the self in sheepskin and lived among the unsuspecting innocent flock of sheep.

With mastered artifice of no humour dissembling, the Pataku falsed his devilish intentions that, none of the sheep escaped from, but approached, consorting with their predicaments and ailments to this hidden enemy of theirs.

No a sheep took a decision without a word from this bloodsucking wolf, being it approval or disapproval of important offices to be undertaken.

The wolf was indeed employed as the physician for the sheep, and the patients taken to his healing room were sure to be pronounced of deaths occassioned by diseases that dictates the carcass should be disposed off without the living's touch to avoid contamination and same fate.

Such disposed off ground is a sure way to the Wolf's glutinous stomach.

If the sheep dreamt, as did the ususpecting Biblical Joseph, it was the enemy in the wolf they seek for interpretation. If the dream was to mean fencing without any intrusion by preying beasts the pen of the sheep, this Pataku would advise otherwise.

These fiendish manipulations of the wolf in sheepskin went on for long, and the family of the true sheep lost their population to fattening the canine predator .

It was when one blacksheep faked bedridden, that the wolf was cought in his devilishness.

Armed with irritating and corrosive venoms in the mouth as that of the canon from the barrels of the bombardier beetle, the blacksheep sprayed doses of these toxins into the eyes of the wolf who was bending on the faking motionless meek animal to add to his insatiable appetite.

In pains, the wailing voice of the wolf revealed its true identity. The sheep took away their timid clothes of gentleness, and hanged at the townsquare this wolf, where the flock fleeted to use their new scarecrow as the lesson they will never forget.

Ghana and Africa today have given the beautiful culture and traditions of old to the cunning hands of a legal system that always seeks apprehending supposed deviants and subject them to lenghty incarcerations.

Those with minor crimes that could even be exonerated by subjecting to community services are held in the gallows for years, taking with them their talents and future.

The rigidity of such legal systems means it's a huge enterprise when one want to study and serve the state as a lawyer or a judge.

With the advent of Covid-19, seeing how overcrowding would cause doom for the country's fragile health system, as the novel coronavirus spread easily without social distancing, Ghana and other African nations are not only releasing some prisoners on parole to decongest the prisons, but some offenders of minor crimes such as flouting the Covid-19 guidelines are sentenced on the spot to do street sweeping, picking rubbish, dusting, and other needful services that not only change for good the offender, but inject discipline in the indiscipline also.

As Covid-19 is presenting us with new normals, we shouldn't leave its lethality stranglehold without having a landmark overhaul in our legal system.

We should be obsessed with pursuing alternative dispute resolution in restoring the pariahed social deviant, rather than sadistically throwing them out of our habitat by closing the world to them with their needed talents.

Continuing that would elude our beautiful world the exceptional talents of future: Zlatan Ibrahimovich, Alpha Blonde, Azumah Nelson, Malcom X, Barack Obama, and many other heroes who history tells their beginings were seen as a subculture to the accepted norms of their environment.

The law schools shouldn't hesitate allowing mass enrollment, the brilliant candidates should be attached to our police stations nationwide. Though would be answerable to the central government, but their charges would facilitate justice delivery and decongesting of our prisons.

We must rebuild from the debris, our fallen walls. No talent should left resting on the fence.

*Written by: Charles Yeboah (Sir Lord)*

*The Founder Of One Ghana Movement #1GhM)*

*Contact /WhatsApp: +233249542111*

**Email: [email protected]*