Ghanaians are no fools

By: Dauda Mohammed Suru

Up till now, no single cause can be said to be behind the Arab uprising. The demands made by protestors were wide ranging, and also evolved as protest movements developed. In Tunisia, protests which began mainly over economic frustration and injustice escalated to anger at corruption in the ruling families and elites. On Friday, December, 17th 2010, a Tunisian street hawker, Mohamed Bouazizi, set himself alight in protest at his harassment and humiliation by a Tunisian security official who had confiscated his vegetable truck. Mohamed Bouazizi became a symbol of the frustrations and sense of injustice felt by many in the Arab world.

Protests in Egypt began on 25 January 2011 and by the close of second week, President Hosni Mubarak tyranny regime was smashed. Protests in Syria started on 26 January 2011, when a police officer allegedly assaulted a man in public in Damascus.

By late August 2011, anti-Gaddafi fighters captured Tripoli, destroying Gaddafi's government and marking the end of his 42 years of power.

Before any of us should preach a repeat of the Arab uprising in Ghana, we should be very clear in our minds whether we appreciate the entire story or we are only interesting in aspects of the story especially the bit of eventually getting a regime change. At the very the least, Ghana will need a preacher who will bath himself with gasoline and embrace fire in the public. Ghana will also need about 5000 women and children to be callously murdered in the public and in a space of about two months.

Unarguably, the economic and injustice frustrations in this country are unacceptable. Since the return to Constitutional governance in 1992, its strongly appears that, all successive governments and mandated state institutions have grossly failed to promote our developmental aspirations; Our rural folks continue to subsidies the urban community by paying more in terms of water tariffs than urban consumers, state regulators allow service providers to run roughshod over the public interest; and all successive governments have governed under the directives of World Bank and the IMF resulting in countless citizens declared redundant and cost of living shooting through the roofs.

The point strongly needs to be made that the left over confident in this Constitutional arrangement cannot be taken for granted. However, the comparisons of Ghana to the then North Africa situation are below the mark. The ruling dictatorship in the Arab World was so deeply entrenched that a peaceful move was a hardly thinkable outcome to these bullying regimes.

In Tunisia and Egypt, the army was the major protection for the regimes. Hosni Mubarak had erected a dauntless military force capable of warding off protesters, whatever the human cost. Footages of ruthless soldiers beating up peaceful demonstrators to death had shown how far those regimes intended to go.

Thus we can undoubtedly assert that toppling such well-entrenched, reactionary and corrupt regimes wasn't a pushover and certainly not though a democratic system that appears to exist here in Ghana today. Admittedly it needed a fierce and determined popular upheaval. Peace wouldn't have been a significant and game-changing weapon in the struggle against those regimes; it wouldn't for sure have definitely tipped the balance in the protesters' side.

The price for the regimes change is no joke. For instance, in Tunisia between December 2010 and January 2011, about 219 people were killed, between January and February 2011, more than 850 people were murdered in Egypt. More than 1500 women and children are recorded to have been killed in Syria in a matter of months.

For Egypt, it’s being more or less a problem with what appeared to be initial gains of revolution turning out to be eventual losses as the possibility of release of former President Hosni Mubarak emerges. Tunisia is yet to fully recover, with opposition activists and politicians becoming subjects of target for Islamists by the day.

Fellow Ghanaians, let us not forget that when there is absence of government and law and order, tribes take justice in their own hands. Personal vendettas will lead to ethnic cleansing, revenge killings and vigilante justice will dwarf all the gains we have made as a country.

Those of us who are not satisfy with the current arrangements and think it frustrating living in Ghana today, can cause a democratic change by organizing our strength around the many issues – hunger, homelessness and disease which confronts us all.

As much as I do not object to how the brethren in Tunisia, Egypt and elsewhere chose to change their regimes, we are Ghanaians and let no one think he or she can fool us to abandon our constitutional arrangements.