The Day Of Fearful Hope

No, this is not a sign of the Second Coming. It is not even an omen of The Revolution. But something of some consequence has occurred in this land, something to be greeted with fearful hope. For eternity I have been wondering whether there is any life left in this comatose, cowered and cowering body of a nation. As I surveyed the insurgent stirrings of suffering humanity the world over in recent days, their discontent and outrage made especially manifest in this “year of elections” – from India and Sri Lanka to South Africa, Senegal and Botswana – I wondered whether our vaunted Ghanaian exceptionalism consists in our matchless docility, our slavish culture of obedience stubbornly unperturbed by the scandalous misdeeds and conduct of our ruling elites. Would there ever come a time when our people scream “we can’t take this anymore,” this cruel material deprivation and defeat of the spirit that comes with it? Can’t stand the ostentatious opulence of the few acquired through daylight robbery of our national treasure? Can’t take all this arrogance they exude and express with everything they do and every utterance that comes from their contemptuous and power-intoxicated mouths? To these wondering sentiments the seventh of December was the beginning of an answer.

For starters, let us count the small mercies we were granted that day. The night before, I was visited by this sleep-mangling dread that I would wake up at dawn to the news that a character nicknamed Napo is my Vice-President, that is to say, the person next in line to hold in his hands stewardship of Kwame Nkrumah’s Ghana! That we were spared the realization of that veritable nightmare was reason enough to pour a libation of infinite gratitude to the kind ancestors. Rivalling in significance was the town-crier’s joyful word that a certain KT Hammond had fallen: KT Hammond, he of the priceless zinger according to which our youth have nothing in their “coconut heads,” nothing that inspires confidence that they have the ability to continue with the work of cultivating the national inheritance. Why? Because a bunch of them dared to boo His Imperial Majesty Akufo-Addo, dared to vent their accumulated and righteous discontent at a festive event where our potentates jubilated while misery stalked the land. Think of that. An elder entrusted by the ancestors with the patient guidance of the young vomiting such hateful scorn for those who embody our future promise. Who does that? As they cheered the ouster of the great albeit imperfect Kwame Nkrumah six decades ago, precursors of the party to which our fallen hero belongs were fond of quoting that famous line from Plato’s Republic, the favoured scriptural text of self-anointed aristocrats: “The penalty which the wise suffer who refuse to take part in government is to live under the government of worse men.” So KT Hammond, author of that moronic zinger, is legatee of the tradition of the wise? Lord have mercy!

The individual fate of these perfectly obnoxious characters is indeed significant. So is the collective, ignominious defeat of the party which birthed them and nourished their insufferable hubris. But that is not all. The repressed pride of a people has stirred, a premonition that they will not stomach disrespect and duplicity forever. From a left political perspective, however, it is to be hoped that all this signifies something more consequential than a rearrangement of personnel, the replacement of one faction of the ruling elites by another, the fake patricians with their inflated sense of entitlement by another band of hustlers chumping at the bit to take their turn, devour the booty and despoil the nation. It is to be hoped that the people’s discontent will not subside, that they will keep on asserting their sovereign power beyond punishing miscreants at the ballot box, that the struggle for a more just society endures. For now, with fearful hope and restrained joy, let us to hum the song of the people’s bard accompanied by the strains of a muted trumpet: “If you are a big tree, we are the small axe…”

Ato Sekyi-Otu
Emeritus Professor of
Social and Political Thought
York University