O, Grandpa, what sort of future are you people going to leave for us? (Part 2)

My grandchild's question to me—posed at the end of the first part of this article—was one of those time bombs that awaits us all and that occasionally gets detonated. Usually, when we least expect it, I mean, when the guy is using his phone to watch YouTube movies, I assume that he’s either watching educational NASA presentations (about astronauts) or one of those noisy cartoons, which are basically disguised war films.

I detest the violence in those weaponized cartoons and often seek—not too successfully—to discourage him from watching them. But, of course, it’s the only sort of thing his playmates talk about, and it’s cruel to make him incapable of matching them, from vivid descriptions of ingenious destruction to more ultra-ingenious destruction! Artificial intelligence had been doing things behind our backs before the recent hullabaloo, I tell you.

I mean, when Americans wake up to the real-life effects of screen violence, as they’ve been forced by AI to do of late, then we must all take notice.

For, can anyone now doubt, from the shootings that sporadically keep turning up in churches, schools, and elsewhere in the US, that all those Indians slaughtered on the screen (thanks to Hollywood!) are at long last getting their revenge?

So, when my grandchild asked whether the “chocolate-coloured water in the river”

he had seen on his screen was for drinking by humans, and I was completely flabbergasted.

Now, one just can’t lie to kids. They have such beautiful innocence and clear minds that they will easily "catch” you if you dare tell them a fib. So I decided to come clean.

“Yes"—I reluctantly admitted it—unfortunately, people who don’t have enough money to buy sachets of water are forced to drink that sort of water. And do you know why it is particularly annoying to see people drink that sort of water?”

“No!” he replied.

“It’s annoying because the water has been deliberately made undrinkable by their own fellow human beings! The water polluters have discovered that there is a lot of gold in the sand and sediment in the riverbeds of Ghana's waterbodies. So they ruthlessly drive bulldozers and excavators into the rivers and use the machines to load a lot of stuff from the riverbeds, take it to another machine to "wash" it, and lo and behold, they get a lot of gold, which they sell to make themselves rich.

“Very rich, in fact. And because of their money, they can get people to vote for the political party they, the gold-diggers, support! And when their political party does get voted into power after an election, they make sure that the Government the party forms does not arrest and jail those who... ”

“Do the galamseys?”

“Oh, you know what it’s called?”

“Yes! We had a lesson about the environment in school the other day. The teacher said that apart from microbes entering the bodies of those who are forced to drink the chocolate-coloured water, some chemicals, such as mercury, are also used in the refining of the gold, and those chemicals too get into the water and can be absorbed into human bodies to cause diseases such as cancer.”

“Wow!” I thought. “This is what all those enormous school fees charged by private schools are for, isn’t it? The guy is clued up!”

And I remembered the elite students from our universities who chanted, “LET THE BLOOD FLOW!” whenever they saw Jerry Rawlings give a speech in 1979. At the time, some people were surprised: how could students who had managed to pass their difficult exams and enter universities, where they are supposed to be taught about the “Rule of Law" and “Human Rights," and that sort of thing be calling on soldiers to "LET THE BLOOD FLOW”?

And I realised that just as the students of 1979 had been coarsened by the way kalabule (over-pricing) in Ghanaian society was starving them and making it impossible to buy textbooks cheaply, and that sort of thing, the current generation of rulers and policy-makers will also, one day (say, when Ghana begins to import water, which only the "galamsey-assisted” rich people can buy!) the future may become very hot for this galamsey generation in its old age.

Didn't an ancient Greek prophet predict, ages ago, that “those who do not remember their own history are doomed to repeat or recreate it?" I concluded.

My grandchild didn’t say anything. I would have given him a penny for his thoughts. But he wasn't to be drawn!