GENERAL OBSERVATIONS
Gone are the days when the Luddite advocates of and elitist anoraks in the UP Tradition terrorized the Gold Coast (Ghana) with reckless abandon, in the process killing children and innocent men and women. Nkrumah’s political vision and eventually the introduction of the so-called Preventive Detention Act (PDA) saved the neonatal corporate polity from disintegration, instability and anarchy, three serious geopolitical deficits we have seen materialize in Sudan, Northeastern Nigerian, Libya, Somalia, Iraq, Afghanistan, Mali, South Sudan, Syria, and a few other hot spots across the world.
Even the National Liberation (NLC), a khakistocratic junta the self-styled democrat Busia advised and with whom he reportedly collaborated in the execution of the 1966 coup, saw the immense security implications of the PDA for political stability and quickly appropriated it to contain the social turmoil in the aftermath of the Western-backed coup. It called it the Protective Custody Decree (PCD). What all these mean is that Busia and the khakistocratic junta set the precedent for coup d’états in Ghana, a teachable precedent that would eventually come back to haunt him in the form of another orchestrated schadenfreude putschism.
That schadenfreude putschism kicked him out of office for gross incompetence, demagoguery, political ethnocentrism, and autocracy. Now that existential threat to Ghana’s national security appears to be no more. This political lemma is not necessarily true. As a matter of fact, the existential threat to the country’s national security is a latent one. It merely is waiting for a critical mass of factors for material expression.
This critical mass of factors likely to throw the country out of the comfortable wreath of relative political stability includes, but not limited to, political corruption; ethnocentrism; armed robbery; sexism as functions of trokosi and witch camps; duopolistic party politics (elective democracy); irresponsible journalism; children studying under trees and teacher absenteeism; underperforming economy; cronyism, nepotism, and other forms of political favoritism; youth unemployment; power outage, politically incorrect partisan insults; mass poverty; official misconduct; gross mismanagement of natural resources and pollution; and so forth. Paying “ghost” teachers real salaries and neglecting real teachers what are due them are national tragedies.
Those are in fact a composite of visible and invisible threats to Ghana’s existence and future. On top of these critical mass of factors is religious fundamentalism. Religious fundamentalism now threatens to join the political fray whereby a potential unstable Ghana is further undermined by popular misunderstanding of elective democracy, economic downturn, official avarice, public corruption, power outage, and the culture of ignorance. We specifically have in mind the psychotic apocalyptic auguries of false prophets such as the Reverend Bempahs, fundamentalist characters steeped in their own sanctimonious miasma-styled messianic complexes.
There is no doubt that Ghana’s duopolistic dispensation is gradually being partially taken over by the sneaking miasma of political theology, a dangerous and worrying trend in the country’s matrix of political survival if not proactively checked. Judeo-Christian fundamentalism, for instance, is steadily enjoying an ascending gradient in the landscape of Ghana’s political economy. It offers itself as a potential if not real threat to the psychology of progressive nationalism. Political Islam or Islamism, on the other hand, is another matter altogether. There has actually been news of a couple or so Ghanaians having been reportedly recruited by and for Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS).
This is great cause for concern. Again, this is serious for all intents and purposes, though no forensic affirmation of the widely publicized claim has as yet been reliably established to assuage public angst. Those who therefore think physical distance is an unbridgeable barrier between ISIS’s geopolitical locations of martial operation across the Middle East and North Africa and potential recruits far away from these theatres of unconventional warfare need to revise their earlier hypotheses. Telecommunication (social media), technology (internet), transportation engineering, and the near-boundless reach of human psychology have all conspired to make physical distance an irrelevant factor in the material and geopolitical topology of international and human relations.
We have seen terrorists avail themselves of the concept of virtual community in the perpetration of their terrorist acts. Successful deployment of virtual community in acts of terrorism underscores our discursive contestation of the ideas of those who essentially view physical distance as a major factor in the indoctrination of potential recruits. This position does not completely rule out the importance of physical distance as a strategic immanent factor in the character of a determined extremist in the perpetration of terrorist acts. Individuals who are sympathetic to the cause of jihadism need not be perturbed by the psychological formidability of physical distance.
Neither is economics the sole reason individuals turn to Islamic terrorism. Osama bin Laden was not poor. Yet it is a complex question that goes beyond the finite template of human psychology. Here we are directly referring to discursive interrogations based on metaphysics, phenomenology, ontology, eschatology, and nominalism. Again, neither is religious fundamentalism the exclusive province of Islam and Judeo-Christianity. Religious fundamentalism is found in almost every religion including Buddhism, Baha’i Faith, Zoroastrianism, Shintoism, Mormonism, and Traditional African Religion. Trokosi, ritual murder, witch camps, and sakawa are part and parcel of the political theology of Traditional African Religion.
Nevertheless, economics is probably part of the ideological framology of a terrorist institution such as Boko Haram. In Ghana, too, economics may someday come to play some role in the indoctrination profiles of impressionable minds if the living conditions of the masses are not improved, though it takes more than the government to improve the living conditions of the masses, and if religious fundamentalism continues to gain a foothold in Ghanaian society as we are presently seeing. The economic factor as it relates to terroristic fomentation could be a farfetched possibility but one cannot, as a matter of principle, complacently underestimate that possibility from material actuation.
What no one can possibly refute, if we may add, is the fact that a section of humanity has complexly lost faith in the power of secular politics to improve the human condition. Or simply answer the perennial question: “What is the meaning of life? This is a speculative interrogation of the immanent infrastructure, of course a query that does not always, even easily, submit to the scrutiny of scientific empiricism. Millenarianism, messianism, and caliphate are obvious ripostes to the failure of secular politics and economic sociology as transforming ingredients in the material and metaphysical recipe of human existence. The political theology upon which Joseph Kony’s Judeo-Christian Lord’s Resistance Army feeds partly derives from Mosaic millenarianism.
All things being equal, the intersection of economics and religious fundamentalism may come to play its part in the instantiation of religious terrorism. Or in pushing certain frustrated persons to architect terrorism. We should understand that coup d’états are ideological acts of political terrorism, the latter of which is always a corollary of one grievance or another including economics and official mismanagement of resources. And we clearly see how resource curse and official management of Nigeria’s oil and gas resources have given birth to economic terrorists in the Niger Delta.
FINAL REMARKS
For some jihadists secularism and materialism are antithetical to teleological aspirations for earthly perfection. Secularism and materialism corrupt human capacity for perfection, that is. But corruptibility is an intrinsic imprint of human nature. That is, corruptibility is a natural consequentialist outcome of that intrinsic imprint. It therefore appears that the intrinsic corruption of man’s nature including such acts as jihadism, political corruption, rape, greed, etc., represents a latent and explicit fixture of conditioned reflexing as a creative response to the varied and expressed complexity of the environment with which man, a social human being, interacts.
This is why our society must not look on unconcerned as traditional culture makes adultcentrism and adultism the exclusive standards for assessing the social psychology of inter-generational interactions. It is an open secret that traditional society assigns godly status to adultism and adultcentrism, both of which sometimes stifle the creative expressiveness of youth initiative, cognitive independence, and civic participation in nation-building exercises. Here we are pointing to societal reinforcement of the positive and organizational attributes of the civic impressionability of youth culture, political sensibility, and creative assertiveness.
Society must therefore work hard to address the charactological deficits of our ephebiphobic traditional society. This is also why pedagogical enforcement of epistemic and deontic authority plays such an important role in Youth Studies. Unfortunately, there appears to be no emphatic didactic focus on the development of Youth Studies in the Ghanaian educational system. In other words, Youth Studies is not a subject of study in Ghana. We should seriously look into this matter.
Finally, tackling youth unemployment should be a national priority. This is not to imply that economic imperatives are intrinsic to acts of religious terrorism per se. That is not what we are actually saying. In fact, what we are also saying is that the paradigm of religious terrorism is a dedicated act of psychological or immanent disposition in the case of those who have undergone militant theological indoctrination. Religious terrorism therefore has a metaphysical aspect to it. It is however possible for some to use religious terrorism to advance their political and economic aims.
Perhaps Boko Haram is a teachable example of the intersection of religious banditry and economic imperatives. Quite apart from everything, we want to see the youth learn something from all these goings-on even as we give them hope, namely something to live for, and not allow themselves to be distracted from exercising and taking full charge of their creative possibilities and potentialities.
FOOD FOR THOUGHT
In the final analysis, more and more people the world over have found a reason to take solace in the purely abstract and utopian framology of existence where secular politics and economic sociology seemed to have grossly failed mankind. Millenarianism, messianism, and desire for the establishment of caliphates are merely three of means a section of humanity want to have in place of secular politics. While economics may play some role in the recruitment and indoctrination of potential terrorists, political Luddites, putschists, and anarchists, we at the same time acknowledge the supreme nature of the philosophical, religious and scientific complexity of the fundamental question of terrorism.
We shall return…
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