Unfortunately, we have not learned from our coups - Senior citizen laments

A former Member of Parliament and a senior citizen, Abraham Dwoma Odoom, has expressed concerns about Ghana's political history and the lessons learned or not learned from past military takeovers.

According to him, the country has failed to learn from past coup experiences, which, according to him, is unfortunate.

The former MP in an interview on GhanaWeb’s People and Places with William Narh, stated: “What I will say is that we have learned so much from all the changes and coups.”

Abraham Odoom, reflecting on the periods of the 1979 and 1981 coups, emphasised the collective anticipation for transformative change during those times.

To him, that anticipation has still not been realized even in the current dispensation of democracy.

“The 1979 and 1981 coups, when those days we were on campus, all of us were involved, and at that time, we were expecting that the past would be broken. I mean, those were the days we were talking about ‘kalabule’; those were the days we were talking about corruption at the highest level.

"So, we thought that 1979 and 1981 would have ended the rot in government. For some of us, our expectations, when we were carrying cocoa were that the transformation, and revolution would have taken us to what Rwanda, for example, is enjoying.

“For me, if we were talking about the coups, my expectation was that Ghana would have been transformed,” he said.

The former MP drew parallels between Ghana and Rwanda, noting that while Rwanda learned from its tragic history and transformed into a model nation, Ghana seems to be caught in a loop of economic challenges and political unrest.

“Ghana sits on so many things, and yet, we find ourselves in a kind of web where we go to the IMF and come back. Rwanda was visited by a genocide once, and they took a lesson out of it.

"When you listen to their history, it means they learned from whatever happened to them and then decided to go the other way, and now when you go there, it is a place to be.

“I ask myself the same question, Why is it that we sit here and the West keeps pointing us to Rwanda and we get ourselves engrossed in the actions of the election,” he asked.

Ghana’s leading digital news platform, GhanaWeb, in conjunction with the Korle-Bu Teaching Hospital, is embarking on an aggressive campaign which is geared towards ensuring that parliament passes comprehensive legislation to guide organ harvesting, organ donation, and organ transplantation in the country.

Watch the full interview of People and Places on GhanaWeb TV below:



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