On Reparative Justice for Africa and the grave corruption by our Political Elite: Does Ghana need an Act of Parliament on inequity and corruption?

Recently the effort of our President in leading an AU-plus charge to demand the formal recognition of the transatlantic slavery enterprise as a crime against humanity and the gravest inhuman endeavour in history continues to receive what is probably a well-deserved accolade of “ the leadership we want”.

The infantile excuse that sought to undermine this legitimate demand, saying there was participation by local chiefs and other nationals who implemented the cooked plan of the slavery system designed to commoditise the Blackman s labour has been flatly exposed. This excuse has been thoroughly addressed by the elegance of simple distinction between intention and execution: intention is everything; execution is its manifestation. Those who intended the crime of slavery had completely designed its implementation. Thus, any guilt of the near-zombilike local chiefs who ordered and conducted the retrieval of their countrymen beyond the point of no return, is a non-essential, if in any way significant, to the establishment of this gravest crime and its true designers and perpetrators.

The concern of this article is whether the African Elite today are not guilty of a similar design to perpetuate inequity among citizens?

Today in Ghana and much of Africa, is it not the political elite the ones who become rich in no time. Are they not the ones who have most access and control of national resources and they use it to benefit, largely themselves and their “followers”. Have they not made economic slaves out of struggling rural farmers who labour so much on the farms to produce the food of the nation and yet are the last along the resource chain?

Think about the peasant farmer producing the tomatoes,’onions, pepper, yams, maize, rice etc. if there is no grand design by the politicians, since independence, to make the peasant farmers of Ghana into economic slaves, then why is it that in spite of the reality of “neo-colonialism”, the elite politicians and other high-level people are rich and getting richer at the expense of the poor masses; why?

Why do we have religious leaders who make money out of their poor congregants, invest the money into lucrative ventures that make their families perpetually rich while their church members continue to suffer in poverty; why?

Why are there a certain category of workers who retire on their salaries and have huge “pensions” for the rest of their off-work lives, while the majority of workers have no pensions at all or the meager; why?

Perhaps the present excitement about the UN Resolution A/RES/80/250 should also be communicated as a mirror of what should happen within African States themselves.

Just as the criminals of slavery gave no real bother to the health education nutrition and economic development of the slaves, so also have the political, academic, corporate, religious and resource-controlling elites of our countries continue to render tokenism as their effort, and mediocre outcomes to the development of our country men in the countryside.

Is there not a moral crime continuously perpetuated by our elites within, to establish a system of inequality and inequity that will economically enslave huge sections of our African population?

It is not too long ago when Ghana took a dishonorable but-they-said-it-was-a-necessary-decision to be labeled a heavily indebted poor country ( HIPC) and we were given a huge debt relief? Where is the fruit of this humiliation of our intelligence? They made us feel we were just a bunch of lazy unthinking populations who cannot do things for themselves. How did our leaders make HIPC really useful for us?

Was it not recently when we were told “the value is the same”, when our currency we re-denominated so we could handle our money in a portable way for huge transactions because the value of our currency was terrible? What happened after one Ghana Cedi was renominated and started having “more value” than one US Dollar?

Our leaders are doing well to let us appreciate the difficulty they face as a result of international trade systems and the globalization of the world economy that does not help them to make our economy great again. We appreciate this efforts but why are they better off as elites than we are?

Why is the father of the house always eating meat and eggs and telling the children that the economy is so hard that the family cannot have protein in our meals; why?

Recently, there was talk about addressing corruption by increasing the salaries of public service workers so they have enough not to steal from the people’s purse. What is enough for the greedy man?

There is so much waste churned out on the streets of greedy Accra: left over foods from restaurants and chop bars, left over bottled water and pure water sachets on the streets and in the gutters; wasted electricity, wasted medicines prescribed to elite patients who are abusing these antibiotics to cause drug-resistant strains affecting everybody. Meanwhile, our countrymen in Zorbogo on the Tamale-Yendi road have no portable drinking water, no health center and no Junior High School.

The elite can give you perfect explanations that they think should satisfy us while we die and perish eternally from this fatalistic leadership.

The Mahama-2 government is trying to convince us that things are changing. I believe. I believe just as much as I believed the Akufo-Addo Administration for a man who was bidding the third time and virtually begged us to make him President. Rawlings ruled for 19 years; Kufuor had a wave of good-will, Nkrumah is still trying to convince us he was the best among the lot and our religious leaders are comforting us with the fear of the “unknown”. Looks like “all we like sheep have gone astray”, in very deed! If we do not de-politicize our development, partisanship will keep us in mediocrity perpetually.

Having come back from Easter and still receiving the praise of this wonder UN Resolution on reparation, let’s all stay committed to the honesty that can make our leadership trustworthy.

There are many of our young people who are in elite politics, and many more in the long queue entering to a space of create loot and share; scratch my back I scratch your back system that is perpetuating economic slavery by ourselves.

Our moral leaders should rise to the occasion. Our political leaders should remove the mask and bite the bullet too.

May be we have to address reparations within as well.

We will succeed!
By Emmanuel Kwame Mensah, Cross-Cutting Excellence