Kweku Baako May Be Underestimating the Treacherous Naivety of Ghanaians

You would have thought that the communications operatives of the ruling New Patriotic Party (NPP) would have been prepared by our education-policy analysts long before the decision by the Ministry of Education (MoE) and the Ghana Education Service (GES) to introduce the Comprehensive Sexuality Education (CSE) program into our Basic School Curriculum. But this well appears not to have been the case, which is why the members of the Akufo-Addo cabinet pusillanimously decided to take cover and inadvisably repudiate this otherwise most progressive policy initiative, as soon as some morally regressive “religious” leaders launched a blistering opposition movement against the same. There is a leadership crisis here; and it inheres in the fact that the Akufo-Addo Jubilee House appears to be far more interested in winning the votes in next year’s election than doing what stands to morally benefit the younger generations in the long term.

The foregoing well appears to have been at the forefront of the thinking of Mr. Abdul-Malik Kweku Baako, the veteran journalist and Editor-Publisher of the New Crusading Guide, when he called for government communicators to quickly step up to the metaphorical plate and instructively explain what the Comprehensive Sexuality Education was incontrovertibly about, and not allow some morally and ideologically stunted religious fanatics to hijack this otherwise intellectually, psychologically and culturally healthy and progressive policy initiative to the detriment of our national development agenda (See “Baako Rallies NPP Communicators to Expose CSE Distortions” MyJoyOnline.com / Modernghana.com 8/6/19).

For instance, we need to underscore the fact that leaders like the President of the Pentecostal Council of Ghana are coming into the field of formal and public education relatively rather very late and therefore need to exercise some cautionary humility vis-à-vis the question of how our children and grandchildren in the Basic School System get taught the decidedly critical academic and cultural subject of Human Sexuality. For the most part, it has been such major mainline religious establishments as the Presbyterian Church of Ghana, the Methodist Church of Ghana and the Roman Catholic Church of Ghana that have been doing most of the heavy-lifting work verging on the intellectual, moral and psychological and professional preparation of our youths for our national development. Most of our leaders and politicians were educated by these so-called mainline religious establishments. So, it is the leaders of these long-established religious and missionary institutions whom the government ought to have been seriously engaged on the implementation of the CSE program right from the beginning, and not the self-righteous and self-serving leaders of the one-man mega churches.

The Akufo-Addo cabinet was also too quick to repudiate the CSE program, which gives any well-meaning progressive-minded Ghanaian citizen the disturbing impression that Nana Akufo-Addo may very well have surrounded himself with political appointees who seriously lack the courage of their convictions, that is, if these men and women have any convictions at all, short of any benefits and privileges that they stand to rake in from their various portfolios. Such poor caliber of executive operatives may primarily be the reason why the President seems to be having such a hard time fighting corruption and pushing many of his visionary and progressive policy initiatives, particularly those initiatives that are geared towards the radical reformation of Ghanaian society and culture.

Indeed, not too long ago, President Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo made it clearly known that he was fully prepared to lose an election if he was convinced that any controversial policy initiative that he was poised to implementing, stood to benefit the overwhelming majority of Ghanaian citizens and residents in the long run. It can be scarcely disputed that the CSE initiative is one such policy from which he stands to make a lasting impact by way of a legacy, and from which he would be far better off not flinching from.

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By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., PhD
English Department, SUNY-Nassau
Garden City, New York
October 6, 2019
E-mail: [email protected]