Is This What “Modernism” Means To Ghanaians?

By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.

In the heated lead-up to the 2008 general election, one of the major presidential candidates was asked at a forum what he thought about the high spate of crime in Ghana in recent times. The concerned New York City-resident Ghanaian citizen suggested that a significant part of the problem may have to do with the opening up of the country and the West African sub-region, in general, to the free movement of human traffic and commercial activities under the guise of the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS). The questioner therefore suggested that something be promptly done to slow down the apparently inordinate influx of foreigners into Ghana, since it was increasingly becoming apparent that many of these emigrants were of questionable character.

What piqued this writer’s imagination was the quizzically cavalier manner in which the presidential candidate – who shall not be named, at least for the nonce – addressed this inescapably pertinent and crucial issue. For starters, the candidate glibly chided the questioner for even daring to suggest that there ever existed some “good, old days” in Ghana when the dearth of serious and deadly crimes was virtually taken for granted. “Get real,” the candidate snapped and added, “This is the modern world. A lot of things have changed. For instance, the population of Ghana has doubled. As for the opening up of our borders in consonance with the tenets of ECOWAS, it is absolutely the right thing to do. For we live in a global village, which means that any attempt to wall off ourselves from our neighbors would be tantamount to living in a fool’s paradise.”

Quite eloquent and thoughtful words, except for the eerily glaring fact that the foregoing remarks do a piddling little to give comfort to those of us who yearn for those good, old Ghanaian days when one could leave one’s door ajar and go to bed without the fear of waking up to discover to one’s horror that a professional head-hunter broke in and spirited away one’s noggins in the dubious name of “modernism.”

Anyway, to his credit, the concerned 2008 presidential candidate was almost the only one of his kind who seemed to have clearly thought out a comprehensive and strategic agenda for drastically reducing the high spate of criminal activity that has befallen our dear motherland in recent years. What we are presently concerned with regards a troglodytic story that appeared in the Daily Guide’s edition of July 6, 2009, barely three or four days before the landmark, whirlwind tour of Ghana by Mr. Barack Hussein Obama, the first African-American to be elected President of the United States of America. Captioned “Passengers Forced to Have Sex,” the story detailed the bestial ordeal of an unspecified number of passengers aboard three separate vehicles traveling from Asante-Mampong to Accra who were hijacked and forced, at gunpoint, to engage in an orgiastic bout of sex with one another by a group of bandits who had mounted a roadblock – or barricade – for this very purpose.

Two things piqued my interest and attention here. The first regarded the fact of my having been born in Asante-Mampong on a Saturday morning nearly a half-century ago. Simply put, my natal association with Asante-Mampong made such heinous and bestial act of criminality all the more repugnant. This, of course, is in no way meant to suggest that had I not been born in Asante-Mampong, at St. Andrews’ Hospital, nearly a half-century ago, that the crime – actually crimes – would have had any less negative or execrable impact on my sensibilities. Still, it is my fervent prayer that the keen reader would perfectly appreciate the thrust of my argument. As of this writing (9/7/09), Chief-Inspector Mohammed Yussif Tanko, of the Public Relations Directorate of the Asante Regional Police Command, who had originally confirmed the veracity, or otherwise, of the incident to the media, had also indicated that the Asante Regional Police Command had initiated a serious and formal probe into the matter. It is our fervent hope that the microbes who orchestrated such criminal acts of indelible trauma would be shortly identified, arrested and promptly prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.

And while, indeed, the avid student of Fourth-Republican Ghanaian politics cannot ignore the wicked dawning of “criminal modernism” on the hitherto staid and placid Ghanaian political landscape, the urgent need for the Government to mount a full-scale war against the fast-creeping culture of bestial criminality cannot be gainsaid. Mr. Rawlings’ two decades of pseudo-revolutionary stranglehold on Ghanaian political culture may be aptly envisaged to have contributed in no small way to the rank moral leadership rot and abject criminality that have virtually become perennial fixtures on our national political landscape. For not only did the twin-bane of the so-called Provisional National Democratic Congress (P/NDC) not do much that was constructive and meaningful for the maintenance and preservation of our national security, besides that which merely guaranteed the hermetic grip of the P/NDC on the reins of governance, the Rawlings Corporation (RC) actually caused the unsavory culture of wanton public criminality to become virtually synonymous with a Ghanaian civic and political identity.

Not surprisingly, nine months into its tenure, the Atta-Mills government continues to exhibit a lackadaisical attitude towards the imperative need to drastically reducing wanton acts of criminality throughout the country.

*Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D., is Associate Professor of English, Journalism and Creative Writing at Nassau Community College of the State University of New York, Garden City. He is also a Governing Board Member of the Accra-based Danquah Institute (DI), the pro-democracy think tank, and the author of 20 books, including “Ghanaian Politics Today” (Atumpan Publications/Lulu.com, 2008). E-mail: okoampaahoofe@aol.com. ###