Ghana, my beloved country is seriously sick

Sometimes I feel very embarrassed and ashamed when I hear people talk about 64 years post independence Ghana. 64 years of self determination has produced a situation where we can not even produce common furniture for our children in school and the children who are so anxious to learn have to resort to sitting on blocks to study. What is so surprising is that, we keep exporting timber everyday to foreign countries to manufacture furniture for their own students in excess of what they need, yet we cannot even use part of the wood to make furniture for our students to foster effective learning in our schools. Are we not a sick people?

I can understand, though persuassively, when we export gold and other minerals to our foreign trading partners to manufacture jewelry and export them back to us, because we do not have the technology to process these minerals from their raw state to the desired finished products, however, what I cannot fathom is that, we don't need any complex technology to manufacture furniture for our children in schools, besides, we don't need any imported components in the manufacture of school furniture. What is wrong with the black man that he is helpless in changing his own plight?

So don't we feel ashamed to have 275 members of parliament who do absolutely nothing except to talk and fight over useless innuendos and ex gratia when students cannot even have basic furniture for their classrooms! So are we waiting for the white people who we think are stupid to give us loans before we can put furniture into every classroom or we are waiting for them to donate furniture made of odum or sapele that we ourselves exported to them back to us? Imagine a farmer who produces a lot of food stuff but sends everything to the market for sale while his children starve at home, what would society think and say of this farmer? Yet that is exactly what we do as a nation. We cut all our precious timber for export and cannot even get quality wood in our own market to roof our houses let alone make quality furniture for our children in school. Tell me if this is not sickening.

in Ghana today, we are not short of carpenters, neither do we need foreign exchange to pay for furniture made by our own carpenters so why can't we put adequate furniture in all our schools 64 years after independence? Can someone explain that to me because " I can't think far". We cannot feed ourselves yet we live on one of the most fertile of all fertile places in the world, we cannot clothe ourselves, we cannot provide enough shelter for ourselves let alone talk about quality shelter, all that we know best is to talk and talk and talk from morning to evening as if that can change our situation. We have politicians hopping from one radio station to another all day just to talk garbage while our water bodies are being polluted and some drying up, our forests are being destroyed while we watch in despair, our roads have turned into death traps.

Let us rise up and put our destiny into our own hands because this business as usual mentality cannot bring us anywhere. The central government has assumed too much for herself and cannot deliver on her mandate. A proper decentralization must be chartered to bring accountability and development in our districts, towns and villages. Let's cut the wasteful expenditures on 4x4 V8 trucks, the numerous celebrations and fanfares and channel the scarce resources into productive use to benefit the mass of our people.

As a nation , I want the central government to come out and tell us how much we saved this year for not organizing independence parade nationwide due to the pandemic and initiate a national dialogue on whether we should stick to this minimal independence celebration in the post pandemic Ghana. In conclusion, I believe that spending millions of cedis to celebrate independence year after year on a large scale as we normally do is meaningless unless it is linked up to the total provision of adequate furniture in all our schools. In my humble opinion, it is very sickening to ask a school pupil to go and March on an independence parade only to return to school the next day to sit on blocks to study. Where then is the independence?