Ghana: The Glorious Sham of Republic Day: A Satirical Meditation

July 1st, or whatever arbitrary date they have now decided to shift it to, is Ghana’s Republic Day.

It is that magical time of the year when the state machinery gears up for the inevitable, nauseating pageantry of self-congratulation. The flags are raised, the politicians don their ill-fitting traditional wear (or worse, remain in their stiff, tropical-unfriendly suits), and the airwaves are saturated with a cacophony of empty patriotic rhetoric as meandering as they’re meaningless.

Ghana’s official celebratory party scripts hardly vary. It is always a grand, theatrical display of independence - a meticulously choreographed pantomime performed before an audience that is being asked to applaud its own chains.

Misleaders understand the psychology. Ghanaians, like most Africans, love to party.

Like most Kumawood scripts, the script is always the same, isn’t it? “Oh, the glorious struggle of our forebears!” one hears the commentators cry with great emotion, usually while sipping imported wine in an air-conditioned studio. They will invoke the ghosts of the independence fighters with the same fervor with which they sign away the nation’s mineral wealth to foreign conglomerates for a pittance.

It is always a delightful cognitive dissonance: to honor the men and women who threw off the yoke of colonialism by perpetuating the very same systems of economic and cultural subservience they fought to destroy.

Our officials are beyond irony.
Perhaps we should not be too harsh on the elite. After all, they have a vital role to play in this annual farce. They must demonstrate to their masters in Washington, London, and Paris that the local comprador class is functioning perfectly.

It is so much more efficient to have black faces and indigenous names managing the plantation than to bother with the logistical headache of importing overseers.

The president himself, in a magnificent display of priorities, will jet off to the United States or Europe mere hours after the shambolic ceremonies concluded. A lunch with neocolonial curators is clearly far more pressing than sitting down with the very people he is supposed to represent to reflect on the day's solemnity.

Does he think we are blind to the fact that his heart is never in the show they put on for us?

Everyone knows we are not truly independent, but they also know that we are a people who love a good jamboree, especially those organized on excessive proportions.

So, they throw us a party, allocate vast sums of borrowed money to it, and hope the noise drowns out the sound of our continued oppression; a palliative to our hungry and troubled souls.

And what a spectacle the plantation supervisors always put on! We parade our military in uniforms of foreign design, wielding ancient armaments we could not hope to manufacture ourselves.

Unashamed, we preen before the world, our heads swollen with a vain pride that is entirely unearned.

How many of the dignitaries were even dressed in the attire of the nation they claim to lead? How many of us, the ordinary citizens, truly embrace our indigenous names, our local cuisine, or our traditional ways of life? How many of us have not abandoned the worship of our ancestors for other people's ancestors?

We have become the most enthusiastic apes of our former oppressors, desperately bleaching our skin and mimicking fake Oxford accents, all while hypocritically shouting about how proud we are to be Ghanaian.

It is a nationwide masterclass in the “Black skin, white mask” syndrome that Frantz Fanon so eloquently diagnosed.

The hypocrisy is truly breathtaking. We boast of our “giant strides” and our status as the “toast of Africa,” eagerly swallowing the self-serving encomiums poured upon us by our imperialist benefactors. We crave their adulation like starving dogs crave bones, forgetting that it was these same masters who conveniently roped us into the HIPC club when it suited their economic interests.

HIPC means Highly Indebted and Poor Country. Let that sink in.

The man who signed Ghana to HIPC is today a revered statesman.

We refuse to see the reality staring us in the face: we are a giant market for discarded foreign junks, with no industrial capacity, no scientific engineering prowess, and no manufacturing capability to speak of.

We cannot even build a simple culvert without running to the Chinese, nor can we construct a road without seeking foreign expertise. We can’t feed ourselves without foreign assistance.

That, however, doesn't stop us from feeling giddy with joy and excitement when we call ourselves the first African country to win independence.

After half a century of self-government, we have not produced a single matchstick or bicycle spoke, yet we expect to be celebrated?

The physical chains of colonial oppression were merely replaced by a far more dangerous and insidious mental chain, roped tightly around our collective psyche.

We have foreign words and foreign ideas imposed upon us, which we glibly and gleefully accept as the pinnacle of civilization, all under the nauseating banner of “globalization.”

We sink deeper into the abyss every day, losing our culture and becoming unique among Africans for our refusal to partake in our own indigenous heritage.

We demand foreign assistance for every single problem we have, lacking the basic instinct to tackle our own developmental challenges.

So, on this so-called Republic Day, instead of the customary indulgence in silly self-congratulations and shameless partying, perhaps we should pause and reflect.

Ask yourselves this: when we compare our own meager journey since independence with the meteoric rise of a nation like China, a country that started with far fewer resources than we had, what exactly do we find that is worthy of celebration?

While the Chinese built factories, we built monuments to our own laziness. While they developed technology, we developed an insatiable appetite for foreign loans. While they became a manufacturing powerhouse, we became a dumping ground for the rest of the world.

Is it not time to drop the mask, stop the charade, and confront the bitter truth? There is no glory in celebrating a republic that exists only on paper.

©️ Fẹ̀mi Akọ̀mọ̀‌làfẹ̀ (1st Dan)

(Farmer, Writer, Published Author, Essayist, Satirist, Social Commentator, Geopolitical Analyst.)

Blog: https://femiakogun.substack.com