Editorial by Ghanaian Times: Emancipation Day urges improvement of lives

Yesterday, the Ghana Tourism Authority (GTA) launched the 2024 Emancipation Day celebrations scheduled for July 22 to August 1, 2024, which is the actual Emancipation Day.

Even though Emancipation Day has been celebrated elsewhere, like in the US, for over one and a half centuries, the GTA put the celebration on its calendar of events in 1998.

This is a day marked to commemorate the resistance of African people in the Diaspora against enslavement and the violation of their human rights, which eventually earned them liberation.

That is to say that the day is a reminder of how important it is to allow everyone on the surface of the earth, no matter his or her age and socio-economic status, to live with dignity.

Dignity can be defined as being able to independently shape one’s life, including the future, to draw on one’s own experience and capabilities, and to live as a respected member of one’s social group and society as a whole.

Emancipation Day has become an annual and national event in Ghana, and it appears the focus is on what it commemorates rather than what it connotes.

What the day connotes—living in dignity—is a kind of connection between the African forebears who laid down their lives for the freedom of the enslaved Africans and the present generations of Africans everywhere.

This is what should be the idea at the centre of the marking of the day as we organise the various events.

We should remember, for instance, that it took the efforts of former slaves, most of whom had been prevented from even learning to read, to establish schools in the southern part of the US and become educated.

What was more was that freed people’s universal demand for education invariably served as the catalyst for bringing public schooling to the South, and the schools were not only for African-American children but also other children, regardless of race, gender, class, or previous condition of servitude.

Every year, Emancipation Day attracts beautiful themes and speeches, but the aftermath events show that the spirit of resilience to create societies that value living in dignity is missing in Ghana and elsewhere in Africa.

African politicians and their cronies continue to plunder the wealth of their respective countries.

Public officials whose reputations are already a strain on the public purse go further to misappropriate public funds that could have been used to improve the lot of their people and make them feel proud as citizens.

Can the Ghanaian masses and others elsewhere in Africa join those in Switzerland to say they are among the people who live in a state of material well-being and relative safety, secure in the knowledge that the lion’s share of their basic needs is well covered? The biting poverty, squalor, and lack in every area of life are so pronounced that no ordinary African, particularly a Ghanaian, can sincerely make that claim.

As the country waits to celebrate Emancipation Day from July 22 to August 1, it should dawn on all its leaders—political, tradition­al, religious, and the like—that the day has a lesson that makes it imperative that they have a duty to improve lives rather than always seeking only their interests.