Integrity Is Homegrown, Not Cheaply Packaged into School Curricula, Kissi Agyebeng!

“Charity,” it has often been said, ad-nauseam, “Begins from Home.” I am very certain that Mr. William Kissi Agyebeng, the Akufo-Addo-appointed Independent Special Prosecutor, like most Ghanaian adults of his age, class and generation grew up hearing this adage innumerable occasions and times. So, it is rather amusing to learn that at a National Anti-Corruption Conference held at the Accra International Conference Center on Friday, June 6, 2025, the Okwawu-Nkwatia native, from former President Akufo-Addo’s political stronghold of the Eastern Region, mustered the chutzpah to lecture conferees on the need for the nation’s educators and curriculum designers to incorporate the prized human behavioral trait of “Integrity” into all public school curricula (See “Integrity Must Be Part of Curriculum to Combat Corruption - Special Prosecutor” Modernghana.com 6/6/25).

Now, I find this kind of platitudinous bunk to be among the most pernicious loads of hogwash bottlenecks to the epic battle against rank corruption - both official and unofficial - in Ghanaian society. What such a lame declaration says about both the speaker and our beloved nation in general is that, we, all of us bona fide and patriotic Ghanaian citizens, have a very long way to go, as a mad man in one of the seminal and artistically resplendent anthologies of the poet Kobena Eyi Acquah once remarked about the so-called Rawlings Revolution in the late 1970s and the early 1980s.

I am also quite certain that Mr. William Kissi Agyebeng, Ghana’s current Independent Special Prosecutor, is either much too young to remember the media drumroll or fanfare that accompanied the landmark launching of Mr. Acquah’s decent aforementioned collection of poetry titled “Where We Are Going Is Long.” I purchased a copy of the book at the British Council Hall, located not very far across the street from where the National Theater currently stands. Back then, as I vividly recall, it was the Efua Sutherland-founded Ghana Drama Studio that occupied the very same spot. That was relatively way back in the summer of 1984. I would take along my carefully and protectively wrapped copy of this soft-cover pearl with me to New York City in July of 1985, when I sanguinely departed the bloody shores and the troubled waters of Ghana’s geopolitics for good, I hoped.

Since then, I have returned to the country for three brief spells, two of them to return the mortal remains of my beloved parents who had made such end-of-life wishes. And the third time around was as relatively recently as the months of June and July of 2018, at the jolly height and the apogee of the Akufo-Addo Presidency, to meet my mother-in-law for the very first and the last time, at her earnest and persistent requests. It is one of the indelible moments of my life, being that the Old Lady, having persistently and incessantly requested that I come down with my family to see her before I lived the rest of my life fraught with regret for not having met her alive, departed this life for the ages, as former US President Barack H. Obama once termed the glorious transitioning of the immortalized former South African President Nelson R. Mandela, exactly a month after we have to the United States.

Guess what? Whoever said that my mother-in-law, Maame Fosuaa Henaku, of Akuapem-Abiriw, was not a great prophet in her own right?! Yes, a great prophet, not a “prophetess” in the traditionally gender-degrading sense of the term. She had been patient enough to wait for us on the patio of her family house. And then exactly one month later, almost to the day, upon our return to the United States, Obaapanyin ’Fosuaa rejoined her ancestors, the philosophical understanding here, of course, being that it is the land of our ancestors from whence we come and to which we eventually return.

You see, what makes Mr. Kissi Agyebeng’s call to incorporate the purely homegrown behavioral trait of “Integrity” into our public school curriculum absolutely nothing short of patently absurd and scandalous, is the fact that there is implicit in such call the “Pretext” of there being a near-absolute absence of this invaluable or highly prized element of human morality in the general behavioral conduct of the overwhelming majority of the Ghanaian people. Which, of course, then leads logically to the question of: Precisely who is/are supposed to design and incorporate the highly prized conduct of morality and ethics into our public school curriculums or curricula?

Maybe some critters from Elon Musk’s SpaceX firmaments or completely out of a vacuum. In simple analogical terms, this is akin to putting the proverbial cart before the horse. Now, hypothetically assuming that, indeed, the cultivation of the spirit and the behavioral trait of charity were homegrown, what Mr. Kissi Agyebeng ought to have more progressively and productively underscored or highlighted, ought to have been the prompt and the imperative need for Ghanaians to undertake deep studies and research into our cultures - and yes, we have cultures, not just one uniform culture - and distill therefrom what we desire to see in ourselves and our children and grandchildren that we presently find ourselves to be sorely lacking.

Of course, we have all heard such bunk talk before from Mr. Daniel Yaw Domelevo, the Akufo-Addo-hired and fired former Auditor-General and, presently, the Mahama-appointed jurist over the alleged professional misconduct of the “Indefinitely Suspended” Chief Justice Gertrude Araba Esaaba Sackey-Torkornoo. To be certain, the very first name and image that flashed through my mind when I read the afore-referenced news report about Mr. Kissi Agyebeng’s National Anti-Corruption Conference Lecture, was Mr. Daniel Yaw Domelevo - he prefers the Akan variation of the Ewe Day-Name of “Yao” - because as one of his former colleagues at the Auditor-General’s Department once wrote to inform Yours Truly, Mr. Domelevo was born and raised in the Asante regional capital of Kumasi. Big Deal, Nana-Togbui!

By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., PhD
Professor Emeritus, Department of English
SUNY-Nassau Community College
Garden City, New York
E-mail: [email protected]