We Are Moral Beings, Therefore We Are Responsible

Usually, I take the backbench position when it comes to passing judgment. But unlike Jesus Christ, my reticence to condemning people who violate common sense is based on the fact that I personally have my own flaws. There are many people who obviously feel peeved because of my actions and inactions. But, I do not cocoon myself to reveling in my sins. Consequently, I do not become a passive observer of unfolding in society.

Following the show of misguided masculinity by Frederick Amanor, a policeman, against a desperate woman, many Ghanaians have rightly voiced their concerns about the incident and other recent police brutalities. I join the chorus of condemnation of the act of the policeman. As I said elsewhere, the action of the policeman and the passivity of the onlookers feed the perception some Ghanaians have about women, domestic violence, and business administration in the country. The idea that women and money are bedfellows has become part of the psychology of some Ghanaian men. Recently, a post has gone viral on social media about how it takes only money to make females happy. The narrative is almost as if females cannot survive without money.

What has informed my writing today is as a result of a suggestion by a section of Ghanaians that the police service should be overhauled. The basis of this argument is that, since the police institution is a colonial invention, it still has a vestige of colonialism that makes the institution anti-civil. I have always maintained that while the police existed as part of the inventions of colonialism in Ghana (then Gold Coast) to suppress dissenting views from ‘old guard’ nationalists and revolutionary nationalists, we have to also understand that the institution has gone through different phases of reforms in postcolonial Ghana. We may not argue that the institution is in its best shape, but it is unwise to argue that the police still hold marks of colonialism. The institution has grown over the decades.

Even so, people have attempted to compare the professionalism of our police with that of so-called developed countries like United States of America. I find this kind of comparison, which seeks to undermine the police service in Ghana, pointless and uncritical. While the United States of America is said to have high pedigree of professionalism in their police service, we are palpably aware of how much the police in the US have consistently reeked of racism in the performance of their duty. The recent reckless shoot-to-kill of African-Americans, which contributed in birthing the ‘Black Lives Matter’ movement, betrays the weakness in the assumption that the US police service is totally sanitised.

My take is that the challenges that have burdened the police are not necessarily institutional. They are, as far as I am concerned, personal, emerging from the agentic role of individuals in the service. I have the benefit of fraternalising with many policemen and women of all ranks. I have also perused through some of the training manuals of the police. I can, therefore, confidently state that, while we cannot claim impeccability for the training manual, we can at least say that the police are given the best of training to execute their mandate as vanguards of civil order.

The occasional foray of some policemen into the realm of absurdity should be seen as a reflection of personal issues, not institutional issue. As persons, we are moral beings, and have responsibility to take charge of our decision. Also as moral beings, we must take charge of our actions and inactions. The attempt to essentialise blame culture has consistently been our major challenge. Blame culture, as opposed to penitential culture, assumes that we must also externalise the reason for our action and inaction. It also absolves and recuses us from accepting responsibility. Consequently, we never get reformed. We also never get better.

Those reading colonial script into the action of the policeman are only magnifying blame culture. They are also gagging and consigning individual responsibility and agency to the backwaters of life. Much as the police service is a creation of colonialism, the institution has had many levels of reforms that assign individual responsibility to policemen and women. We cannot, therefore, continue to invoke the colonial (il)logic to explain recent happenings within the institution.

As I have stated elsewhere, Mr. Frederick Amanor appears to have a psychological challenge, because of two main reasons: First, he invested unreasonable energy in enforcing perceived law and order at the bank, and second, he exerted a disproportionate response to a harmless nursing mother who was only asking for her money. If my assumptions are right, then he should be made to undergo proper psychological test. Once that is done, we should be able to uncover the reason for his action.

I have read elsewhere that the family of Mr. Amanor has apologised to his victim. That is well and good. What needs to follow up is for the police to conduct their investigation to help in purging some miscreants in the service. In addition to that, the recent police killing of seven Zongo young men, alleged to be armed robbers, should thoroughly be investigated. The reassuring that the president of the Republic, Nana Addo Dankwa Akufu-Addo, has asked the police to investigate these two unfortunate incidents that have cast a blur on the police service. I know Ghana's police service will continue to help consolidate our democratic gains. Let us help in reforming the police.

Satyagraha
Charles Prempeh ([email protected]), African University College of Communications, Accra.