body-container-line-1
05.12.2007 Feature Article

One Hail Mary For Act 506

One Hail Mary For Act 506
05.12.2007 LISTEN

Some forms of unfairness and injustice are of such a vexatious nature as to make even saints let fly those unprintable three- and four-letter swear words which populate the street gangster's dictionary from cover to cover.

So it came to pass that while the Catholic Bishops Conference of Ghana did not swear at anyone over the matter this week, the bishops did articulate their convictions regarding the educational reform in progress here very strongly.

So strongly, indeed, as to have given those who have always been uncomfortable with the church, her doctrine  and general outlook on national affairs, a providential opportunity to indulge their favourite pastime with real gusto: Bashing the church like no fufu pounder's business.

When the Catholic Church builds hundreds of hospitals, clinics, health posts, primary schools, junior high schools, senior high schools, technical and vocational schools and training colleges across Ghana folks love it!
When the church demands a say in how the educational institutions are managed and run, the same folks say the church is being unreasonable.

Who is being unreasonable under the circumstances, Jomo?
I tried to figure it all out while stuck for hours in motor traffic on High Street.

These are the typical scenarios which play out on our roads from dawn to dusk these days:

You are well and truly trapped in a dense mass of motor vehicles inching their way millimetre by millimetre like disabled snails, along one of the busy roads in the capital.

It is 10 am, but the sun is already up and mercilessly roasting the city. Up ahead, the big eye of a traffic regulating lamp keeps up a monotonous and annoying visual game of changing from amber to red to green and back to amber and then red and green all over again.

It does not really matter, Jomo, because no matter the colour of the big glass eye up ahead, no vehicle moves.
After several millenniums have passed, one or two motor vehicles ahead of you are miraculously able to inch forward by the tiniest fraction of a centimetre, and then the stream is firmly stuck again.

While all that is going on, Jomo, an army of street hawkers is swarming all over the place, thrusting sweaty faces into the cabins of cars and brandishing all manner of merchandise under the noses of morose drivers and passengers nursing flayed tempers.

You may sit in a motor vehicle cursing your luck and building up a blood pressure at the peril of your health. You could listen to music on the car stereo, or try catching up with the news, which was what I was doing.

It was quite discernible from the news that the all-powerful government, well disguised in the convenient but under-sized hat of the Ghana Education Service Directorate, is on a big collision course with the Catholic Bishops of Ghana!

The government appears to have this strange notion that there are living organisms which can survive without oxygen.

Without the oxygen of God's breath, won't the very spirit of a nation and the souls of her individual citizens wither and die?

Yet the government has all but scrapped religious instruction from the curricula of schools under the educational reform. Under the educational reform, religious and moral instruction, is now an obscure appendix (the bishops' word), to other subjects on the curriculum.

Teaching religious instruction won't populate our land with saints, but hey, it will lay the critical foundation needed for building a wholesome and disciplined society, don't you agree?

The Catholic Bishops issued a Pastoral Letter on the issue. The letter got officials of the GES hopping mad, but I am coming to that.

While walking on the campus of a university in the UK years ago, I overheard two young undergraduates who were walking behind me discussing the likely outcome of some aspects of Tony Blair's domestic policy, from such profound and insightful perspectives that I was pleasantly amazed.

They were conservatively dressed; the studious type. They were the exception to an apparent rule I had become accustomed to.

The rule as far as I had been able to discern, was that most of the Obroni boys and girls would gravitate en masse towards the centre of this university-city at night, and go pub crawling well into the dawn, when they would stagger back to campus, kicking at anything in their path, tearing at street posters, banging on cars, yelling, screaming and howling like a pack of tomcats.

A dozen of them made a riotous midnight return after a wild outing and began streaking on a brightly-lit street! It was quite a sight, Jomo.

I said to a colleague from Nigeria: “Oga, these spoiled youngsters will inherit the leadership of this country one day. That will be when their over-permissive society will crumble like a pack of cards in uncontrollable social disorder.”

From some press reports this week, it appears that the GES is more concerned with the “harsh” tone of the bishops' Pastoral Letter on the issue of religious and moral instruction under our educational reform, than the substance of the arguments raised in the letter.

According to the Daily Graphic, the GES “will be less open to negotiations” due to the tone of the Pastoral Letter. What! Government bureaucrats allowing their emotions to play into a serious national exercise they have been mandated to oversee?  Something serious is amiss, Jomo.

The GES finds it unacceptable that the Catholic Bishops also want to have a say regarding who gets appointed to head Catholic schools. 

Someone even sent the text of the Hail Mary with accompanying derisive remarks to a radio station as a kind of “commentary” on the matter.

The angry and belligerent reaction of the GES to the bishops' Pastoral Letter is likely to backfire. My enquiries suggest that in coming weeks, protest letters with multiple signatories will flood President Kufuor's desk.

The letters will demand an immediate review of GES Act 506, to allow the church to run its schools on the church's principles. No one invests billions of dollars in projects for nothing, my brother.

There is a curious footnote to all this: The Catholic Church seems to have established so many educational institutions in the country that she has now lost track of the statistics.

I called the National Catholic Secretariat, the Holy Spirit Cathedral and the Greater Accra Region Catholic Education Unit to enquire about the number of Catholic primary, junior and senior high schools, vocational and technical schools, and teacher training colleges countrywide.

I was told the General Manager of Catholic schools had records of the number. His office telephone number was unfortunately, “temporarily out of order.”

That is reverse happenstance, Jomo, because the decades-old Government-Catholic Church partnership, in the development of education, is also temporarily out of order.

body-container-line