Ghanaian Politics Trapped In a Pandora’s Box 2

However, unbeknownst to Mr. Politics, the expectant mother, the quadruplets had wanted to understand why their mother publicly went about carrying these political negatives under her skin! Those aforesaid observations do make up the major partisan political characteristics which have since driven Mr. Politics into a claustrophobic hole called Pandora’s box. This scenario of political characterology is also descriptively identical to rhetorical circumvention of the expectant mother, Mr. Politics, by the quadruplets, two males, two females. The expectant mother’s little male sons had wanted to understand, severally, how their mother’s political hips became as wide as the flappy wings of a winged dinosaur. One of the two girls in particular had wanted to know more about the secrets to her mother’s protruding belly, the other about her protruding behind. The expectant mother was in effect trapped in a Pandora’s box of youthful inquisitiveness.

The quadruplets’ father’s paunch, his corrupt political potbelly, is another matter. Still, the little children are correct to acknowledge human anatomy as not being a piece of leavened dough, for human anatomy follows the developmental path of its own unique physiology of internal rhythm and textural consistency! Similarly, Ghana’s politics derogates from this developmental path of autogenic rhythm, moral consistency, and spiritual resoluteness. We are back full circle to Mr. Politics’ dilemma: The moral particularity of righteous lying! Wole Soyinka appreciates the instrumentalist value of this moral dilemma as a tool of internal critique, thus writing: “A charge of burglary is not vitiated by clear evidence of ‘inside job’?which might include having left a window open for the intruders. Where the house owner stubbornly denies clear evidence of internal dereliction, however, he effectively becomes an accessory to future robbery and loses the moral right to restitution, or, indeed?justice.”

Soyinka inferentially lays the moral problematic of righteous lying and of collusion at the doorstep of human consciousness. Consciousness, collusion, and righteous lying are no excuse for moral exculpation. A lie is a lie whether it is righteous, conscious, or noble! Clearly Mr. Politics does not appear to discriminate among the latter. Evidently, the moral problematic of Soyinka’s sharp philosophical formulation takes after that which confronted Adolf Hitler and his propaganda minister Dr. Joseph Goebbels, two pillars of Nazism: Lie, lie, and lie until the forest of lies becomes oceans of truth, meaning that truth and falsehood eventually overlap in seeming compatibility of creative expressiveness with the passage of time. The politics of lies and of scriptural mis-exegesis then resolve into a facial conflation of divisive Ghanaian politics, a world untypical of the lyrical romanticism of Peabo Bryson’s and Regina Belle’s “A Whole New World.” They sing:

“Unbelievable sights; indescribable felling; soaring, tumbling, freewheeling; it’s crystal clear that I’m in a whole new world with you…A whole new world; every turn s surprise; with new horizons to pursue; every moment gets better; l’ll chase them anywhere!”

A whole new world indeed, a world where human beings relate to each other as neighborly as the mind relates to the brain, the toenail to the toe, the truth to honesty. Simply put, a whole new world where dreams reincarnate into material realities, not nightmares, like the whole new world of Bob Marley’s “Wake Up and Live.” A whole new world where social worms are not poisonous political snakes. What kind of world does the congenitally lying Ghanaian politician share with the electorate? Does this “crystal clear” world pertain to matters of institutional transparency, accountability, and probity? Is this world romantically indescribable and unbelievable as the describable, believable unloving world shared between the corrupt politician and his nonchalant electorate? Ghana needs to work hard on the moral attainment of social equity. Unfortunately, the politician’s language based on partisan political theology is radically different from electorate timidity.

Framed otherwise, Ghanaian politicians want to see the electorate from a position of elitist strength. Assata Shakur maintains in that regard: “Nobody is going to give you the education you need to overthrow them…if they know that that knowledge will set you free!” Equity is the response to social stratification. In that case egalitarianism should be the defining thrust of Ghana’s development economics. But egalitarianism does not necessarily rule out imaginative questions bordering on private enterprise, individual entrepreneurialism, healthy competition, and so on. Egalitarianism may be conceptually utopian and distant but that should not stop well-meaning Ghanaian politicians from getting close to its material relevance. After all, egalitarianism cannot be as wickedly elitist as leprosy can be grotesquely unwelcoming. Death in life is relatively, even morally, better than life in death. Ghana must die and be born again!

Of course, this is not going to be an easy project as socialist ideals and capitalist exploitation are mutually antagonistic to each other. Accurate theoretical formulation is the response to the problematic praxis of social stratification. Still, a theory may not necessarily be awkward though its experimentation in a real-world setting may pose unintended hardships for man’s intellectual conditioning and living conditions. For instance, according to snippets of scriptural information from both the Hadith and the Koran, Prophet Muhammad allegedly ascended to heaven from the City of Jerusalem for a private audience with Allah. Jesus is also alleged to have ascended to heaven upon accomplishing his mission on earth. Nonetheless, both of these scriptural narratives seem antithetical to the behavioral mechanics of gravitation. What is more, the question of transcendental ascension must have required a magnitude of propulsive force large enough to neutralize the autocratic physicality of gravitational force and a surplus of energy large enough to sustain the continuous upward propulsion of the two supernatural men, Jesus Christ and Prophet Muhammad, and back.

The question is: Is transcendental ascension reproducible in a laboratory test tube? Certainly spirituality is not a concept that can be scientifically reproduced! Then again, spirituality is as nebulously elusive as the political psychology of the average Ghanaian politician. This ascension theology falls outside the rational realm of NASA space science, demonstrating a manifest disconnect between the intellectual impracticalities of political theology and the dialectic imperatives of scientificity. Apples and rains were falling from the skies long before Isaac Newton’s birth and still continue falling today after the law of gravitation came into mathematical existence. Ghanaian politicians have tactically converted this transcendental ascension theology into romanticized political jingles, promising the honey of heaven while producing the acidic lemon of hell instead, of ideological dogmatism. They tell the world the Black Stars played against Uganda when, in fact, political kleptomania in Ghana played against the secular brutality of the ghostly Idi Amin.

In the meantime, the 1-1 draw between Ghana and Uganda is demonstrably not an allegorical happenstance, in which case the political tournament imputes a measure of moral parity to Ghana’s rising political kleptomania and Amin’s pre-ancestral political deviltry. These callous Ghanaian politicians would that you had known Isaac Newton formulated his theories before his birth or that the proverbial Newtonian apple began falling from the sky only when the law of gravity came into mathematical beingness! No wonder Ghanaian politicians of all ideological stripes claim to be in possession of the holy Newtonian apple. This same Newtonian apple must have been the pundic bull’s eye which Adam’s stiff serpentine phallus dishonestly gunned for, ultimately culminating in the downfall of the Ghanaian political animal in a spiritual cage, the Garden of Eden, a misleading nomenclature for the so-called Golden Jubilee House. The latter is merely a house of corruption!

That directly brings us to the proverbial doorstep of a dilemmatic lie, the garri-and-water political controversy. It turns out the garri-and-water recipe and leavened dough, in theory, have some useful innate properties in common, one of such being the self-driven ability of either to autostart the process of autogenic reorganization in their detached constitutions, then leading to a “rise” in their material volumes. This property of autogenic “rise” reeks of the illicit material and pecuniary aggrandizement of Ghanaian politicians upon resumption of officership as well as of the expectant mother’s politically corruptible widening hips, gastric and rump protrusions. Ghanaians are not even cognizant of the fact that her disproportionately large, forwardly bubbling breasts might be the secret domiciliation of the Newtonian apple of political corruptibility. Where exactly, then, do Ghanaians begin the torturous activity of national soul-searching, as a matter of fact?

The political humanism of the CPP is not dead yet. In fact it permeates through the ideological stomata of political activism in Ghana today. Ghanaians may want to look in that direction for national reincarnation. That is just the beginning of the apocalyptic controversy. How? This is not a cheap philosophical question. It is, however, even more confusing when Prof. Eric Verlinde, a respected physicist at the University of Amsterdam’s Institute of Theoretical Physics, adds a contrarian voice to a strange dilemma dealing with a cherished universal law, specifically gravitational law, claiming gravity does not exist. His scientific paper “On the Origin of Gravity and the Laws of Newton” lays out a powerful mathematical and philosophical argumentation in support of his radical views.

The philosophical tension between Isaac Newton and Eric Verlinde may push the threshold of cosmic actualities beyond the principle of evidential existentiality. Is that so? Perhaps. Who is wrong here then, Isaac Newton or Eric Verlinde? Who may possibly be lying here then, Isaac Newton or Eric Verlinde? Can they both be correct? Can they both be wrong? What have Henri Poincare, David Hilbert, Elmer Samuel Imes, Albert Einstein, and Karl Schwarzschild got to say about this cosmic impasse? This collection of inventive men are dead. What can death possibly say about the living? Is Ghanaian politics dead or living? Can Ghanaians bring politics back to life? Is this task worth the ideological factionalizing of the NPP or of the NDC? Is Eric Verlinde taking undue advantage of Isaac Newton’s passing to throw dust in the public’s eye, much as some splintered disgruntled CPP groups and their cohorts of ungracious apologists in both the NPP and the NDC are doing?

Yet death may ironically be a powerful tool of truth rather than of life. Death may also have a set of sharper teeth than life’s. These ontological assertions expand theoretic possibilities for human intellection. It means dead progressive ideas could as well be retrieved from the political underworld and given dialectic jolts of atavistic newness. This points to politics as a veritable instrument of philosophical culturalilty with reference to the circular pliability of Sankofa, a fact already acknowledged in Part 1. We have similar questions for Ghana’s two leading political parties, the NDC and the NPP, because we have already begun to notice parallel patterns of ideological hostilities between Ghana’s political parties on the one hand and between political parties and Ghanaian citizens on the other hand.

What do Verlinde’s “On the Origin of Gravity and the Laws of Newton” and Ghana’s “Senchi Report” and Mr. Politics have in common in terms of ideational practicalities for improving the human condition? Is there any possibility of political meritocracy dethroning Ghana’s kakistocracy and kleptocracy? Is it not high time the people gave another political party a chance at governance? How can the people help Ghana sneak out of the Pandora’s box? Who should initiate the national project of soul-searching? Should it be the political kleptomaniac or religious kleptomaniac? Thus, we argue that Ghanaians become warier about the corrupting power of politicians’ language. “But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought,” writes George Orwell. Orwell could not have put it more succinctly.

Here, we see a rich tapestry of relational circularity between the politics of “thought” and the politics of “language,” another view feeding upon the philosophical culturalilty of Sankofa. A snake’s tail could as well be its head. One of the openings of the alimentary canal is located privately between the cleavage of the human buttocks, the other publicly between the chin and the nose. Creative possibilities are everywhere. And anywhere. Yet Ghanaian politicians have conveniently elected to look the wrong way! That is the true nature of political scarecrows.

Where should Ghanaians look? East? West? South? North? This is like the conversation between the quadruplets and their expectant mother. East, one of her hips. West, her other hip. North, her gastric protrusion. South, her rump protrusion. Why look the wrong way when the source of Ghana’s rising problems and their innovative solutions are right before the intellectual canopy of politicians? And who should lead the battle against corruption? Should it be the unborn child, the ancestors, and the grotesque corrupt chiefs and kings? Should it be God? Should it be the Devil? Is politics anything like the lies told by the expectant mother to her quadruplets? Let no one forget that the philosophical contention between Isaac Newton and Eric Verlinde serves as an instructional metaphor for the unnecessary ideological hostilities between the NDC and the NPP. And let the CPP be the mediating hand of moral wisdom. What do we do? Are the people, the quadruplets, even aware Mr. Politics, the expectant mother, is the national Pandora’s box we have been discussing all along?

Well, the flappy political hips of Mr. Politics are anatomically balanced out by the sensual ideology of gastric and rump protrusions. What does this say of the deceptive attractiveness of Ghanaian politics? The strangeness of nature. But where do we begin telling the story of the two-headed snake, two callous heads on opposite ends of the snake’s sinuate length? The strange story of the two-headed snake in question is the shameful story of the NPP and the NDC!

We shall return…