Diaspora Observer Team sounds Alarm Bells over 2024 Elections

The first team of Diasporans that have been in Ghana for the past couple months , monitoring pre-Election sentiments within the country , have sounded alarm bells to state security agencies that Ghana’s democracy is indeed going to be tested in this year’s 2024 general elections.

Speaking on an internet base Radio station, Akasanoma Radio, the head of the team Mr Eric Kwakye, stated emphatically that the young people in Ghana have reached a tipping point, and if political party leaders don’t react responsibly in the national interest, lives would be lost.

Travelling through various parts the country , it became evident that the sheer sense of desperation with the youthful population of the country, has led to many young men and women doing desperate things to survive within a system that has no plans to arrest the UNEMPLOYMENT epidemic Ghana faces today.

The Ghana government’s flagship policy dubbed FREE SHS, has created the unemployment pandemic that country faces today because it was rolled out in a hastily manner to honor campaign promises made in 2016 , and the oversight to the nitty gritty details that should have been taken into consideration before the roll out where all left behind . Today the Free SHS is graduating young men and women with no future in sight. Today the Free SHS has become a death sentence to many young people due to the UNHEALTHY conditions that these students have to undergo in their various secondary schools across all the regions.

It was heartbreaking to visit a few secondary schools to see what the eat , and conditions in their various dormitories. Some schools were infested with bedbugs so much that our team had to disinfect themselves after leaving the schools .

A scandalous saga of expired rice being forcibly given to schools across Ghana to feed their students with is very heartbreaking, because our team took evidence of some rice meant for poultry feeding , was all given to students to eat , and one of the matrons in a particular school in the Ashanti Region when asked if she herself would eat or feed her own kids with the rice she is serving the students with, admitted that she won’t eat nor would she allow her children to eat, yet she is okay with serving it to other peoples children.

Now if the Free SHS policy was well thought through, they would not take beans from a beans growing community/region , store it in another region , and then schools within the beans growing region, would have to travel all the way to the other region to collect beans to bring to the schools within their region to feed their students, so these and many others are what has plagued and clogged the channels of proper feeding of the students across the country .

Many of the young graduates have been bitter and are ready to take up arms to express their desperation and disappointment against the political establishment. Young FSHS graduates who completed in 2019,2020, 2021, 2022 to 2024 are all eligible to vote in this year’s elections , and the horrible horrifying experiences they went through is the focus point for their decisions on which party to vote for. Lives have been lost by malnourished meals served in some of the schools , not to mention the high cost of educational materials parents have to endure just for what has been packaged as free .

In conclusion, there are some political hoodlums who have managed to buy the minds of many of these young unemployed Ghanaians , with the aim of disrupting the elections in a bid to rig it in their favour . It is also shameful to note the tribal politics that some seem so comfortable with. The remarks made in response to the former president Kuffour in our view is well placed under the circumstances and Ghanaians should stop with the hypocrisy because an older person can be foolish and young person should be able address that .

Long live Ghana 🇬🇭
A. Dodoo
Chairperson for Diaspora Development Network and Social Commentator

“My views and opinions are strictly mine and not position of DDN as an organisation “