A Political Coin of Three Sides: What Do We Actually Want? ?Part lla

“My First Coup D’état.” That is the book. President John Mahama has finally managed to give the people, including the youth, a bitter taste of what he has, ironically, called “my first coup d’état.” In fact, President Mahama’s “my first coup d’état” is nothing other than a bitter herbs salad, a social and political maror, that’s, of political inaction, lack of moral leadership, and ideational cluelessness. And the youth, we are certain, are watching, watching closely. Isn’t youthfulness the pineal eye and moral tail of social and political elderliness?

What does it, “My First Coup D’état,” say about corruption and anti-corruption? Actually, in the prequel, Part l, we did not generally touch on these themes, especially the latter, in any appreciable detail. Rather, we used the prequel to make a case for the national training and education of the youth to be a social, moral, and political force in the body politic, particularly in the fight against corruption, among other national ailments. We, again, advance this theory here in this essay because today’s leadership has failed to show moral and social leadership in the face of mounting national crisis. Indeed corruption threatens the very future of the youth.
Let’s make a comment or two about President John Mahama’s book before proceeding further: President Mahama’s book must be read in tandem with Wole Soyinka’s “The Open Sore of a Continent,” Ali Mazrui’s “The African Condition: A Political Diagnosis,” Molefi Kete Asante’s “Rooming in the Master’s House,” and Godfrey Mwakikagile’s “Africa In A Mess: What Went Wrong and What Should Be Done” and “Africa After Independence: Realities of Nationhood.” In fact, these bibliographies must be included in every secondary school curriculum as well as the curricula of teacher training institutions across the country. We may then use them as bibliographical platforms to ask students to come up with comprehensive solutions to our myriad national problems.
Granted all the foregoing, what are some of the solutions we have in mind? What role do today’s youth have in the political economy of Ghana’s budding democracy? Does numerical preponderance count in electoral franchise? Are today’s youth ready to exercise their electoral might against the wicked forces of social and political retrogression? And given that the strength of democracy is the groin and hyoid of progressive societies, can our educational institutions sufficiently train the youth to exercise the power of franchise to transform their society?
Kofi Annan realized the creative power of youthfulness when he said: “As individuals you have lots of power not only in the political arena but even in the areas of environment, you’ve power by the choices you make…When you decide to organize yourselves leaders will emerge amongst you, accept and respect them and don’t say who is to want to lead….” Therefore, mutual respectability as well as social and institutional organization must be part of the creative inventory of solutions for the political mobilization of the youth. But this must be done within the contextual limits of our constitution. Which parts of Ghana’s constitution are taught in our secondary schools? Do the youth know all their constitutional rights?
Unfortunately, our corrupt and incompetent political leaders have persistently told us, the youth, that the idolized wisdom of gray hair no longer has the weight of social and cultural respectability it once enjoyed, that elderly grayness probably does not count anymore in the sphere of social intercourse where elderliness and youthfulness constitute the major players. “Once a man, and twice a child,” says the great Bob Marley. What does this mean? In fact, the apothegm has serious philosophical depth. In other words, it’s a layered philosophical lyricism transmitted to us via conscious roots reggae. The man was ahead of his time. Similarly, the youth must learn to think ahead.
Let’s attempt a philosophical response. But how exactly do we explore the question? We may want to look at it via the brewing political tension between youthful agitation for social reform and leadership crisis. Therefore, following the sociology of Marley’s existential logic, we may tell the youth that passage of corrupt leadership, symbolized by “man,” has come to or is nearing its end, an existential cul-de-sac, and that the time has finally arrived for youthful dispensation, symbolized by “twice a child,” to assume the creative and moral replacement of the characterological inadequacies of “man,” an immoral dinosaurian elder. Let’s go one step further and give Marley’s wisdom a Pauline gloss: “Old things are passed away; behold, all things are become new!”
In addition, the phraseology, “twice a child,” among other possible interpretive extrapolations, philosophically confers existential youthful power and universal wisdom over the social finiteness of political elderliness in numerical context. That is to say, the conscious philosophical lyricism of Marley adequately explains the ideological equation between “man,” a singularized archaic social force, and “twice a child,” a pluralized social hurricane. Incidentally, the line “once a man and twice a child” comes from the track “Real Situation,” which is a world the youth must build for themselves. On the other hand, the situational irreality related to the politics of corrupt political elderliness must be part of the paleontology of social rejection.
This is not to say the youth must disrespect their elders, however. After all, the grayness of youthful hirsutism is no match for the tortuous peregrination of elderliness, political, cultural, and social! That said, the philosophical, even social, question must be this: What kind of realistic situational world must the youth create for themselves and for their yet unborn posterity? Let’s rephrase the question: Can Ghana’s present corrupt institutions and leadership be allowed to play any role in building a brighter future for today’s youth? If this question is intellectually and philosophically permissible, what can the youth do to reform the corrupt institutions and leadership? The question is morally one of philosophical seesaw. And therefore it must be handled with analytic prudence.
The question again is this: Do the youth want Sir Thomas More’s “Utopia,” Achebe’s “Man of the People,” Orwell’s “1984” and “Animal Farm,” Awoonor’s “This Earth, My Brother,” Hitler’s “Mein Kampf,” Armah’s “The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born,” Machiavelli’s “The Prince,” Hochschild’s “King Leopold’s Ghost,” Mahama’s “My First Coup D’état,” Soyinka’s “The Open Sore of A Continent,” Thiong’o’s “Petals of Blood,” Asante’s “Rooming In The Master’s House,” Swift’s “Gulliver’s Travels,” Solzhenitsyn’s “The Gulag Archipelago,” or Dante’s “Divine Comedy”? The youth must not rush a decision. Certainly, a transformative response requires consultative deliberation.
Yet part of the creative repertoire of responses may have to include a possible replication of the Arab Spring in a Ghanaian situational context. But we will not invoke or recommend it as one of the practical repertoire of solutions, as having recourse to proactive constitutional instruments can effect the same social and political changes in the body politic. In fact, the Arab Spring has paved the way for Islamic millenarists and nihilists, the Moslem Brotherhood, and other radical political theocrats to usurp the limited freedoms many Arabs previously enjoyed. Now the shadow of social and political uncertainty has taken over the geopolitical personalities of many Arab societies. This has given us cause to doubt the efficacy of political vigilantism.
Meanwhile, anarchy, political vendetta, anomie, and economic decline have accompanied the Arab Spring. African progressivism has no room for the rigid theocracy of political terrorism and of democratized authoritarianism we have come to associate with the Arab Spring. Ghana needs to create a progressive system of creative solutions for her youth. Possibly, the Arab Spring may even be an extension of the controlling arm of Western intelligence agencies. Who knows?
Another consideration worthy of our attention concerns the corrupting influences of certain aspects of our contemporary culture, a situation which directly or indirectly impacts youth perception in many ways: The question of materialism. It’s a statement of fact that the social miasma of materialism has pervaded the media, educational and religious institutions, politics, music and film industries. Sex, profanity, and vulgarity have become the public face of our movie and music industries.
Furthermore, senseless celebrity worship and cheap sensationalism have taken the place of native wisdom, truth, respectability, and dignity. Social pornography has replaced social decency. Lazy and gossipy journalism have replaced investigative journalism and muckraking. Our hip-life preaches social antagonism, free sex, spiritual vanity, libertinism, and hedonism. In effect, many of our youthful hip-life musicians characteristically use the genre to promote social vices. A few of our musical elders have even appeared on some of these socially unfriendly tracks. How do we expect the youth to fare in this modern-day Sodom and Gomorrah?
In the meantime, national corruption, nepotism, political prostitution, cronyism, political prevarication, unauthorized sale of national assets, to name a few, have become a pastime for many in politics, even while the youth are watching with eagle eyes and internalizing them. They watch them on television. They hear them on radios. They read them in the newspapers. Their parents confirm them. Wherever they turn, there are cyclones and tornadoes of scandalous corruption staring them in the face. What are some of the interim solutions we can adopt as a nation to ensure that youthful internalization of these shameful national misdeeds don’t lead to psychological ossification in the nooks and crannies of their impressionable personalities?
One way to go, besides what we have already discussed in the foregoing paragraphs, is to prosecute public criminals and, thereby, send strong signals to the youth that criminality of any kind is not condoned by the state. The other strategy is to make it part of the pre-release arrangement of convicts to go to secondary schools and youth organizations to talk about Ghana’s national criminal codes, corruption, criminal prosecution, and prison life. Inculcating attitude change strategies in the youth, undermining negative social influence amongst the youth, and suppressing criminal proclivities of youthful exuberance must assume precedence over all else. Building stronger institutions where the youth are given collateral roles in the national reformation process is another socially healthy and creative approach.
As our final words to you, the youth, allow us to share Nas’ “I Can” with you: “I know I can be what I wanna be if I work hard at it…B-boys and girls, listen up: You can be anything in the world, in God we trust. An architect, doctor, maybe an actress. But nothing comes easy. It takes much practice…” These are some of the positive things we must tell the youth. Are we done yet?
Rapper Nas has more. Listen up, folks: “Like, I met a woman who’s becoming a star. She was very beautiful, leaving people in awe. Singing songs, Lina Horn, but the younger version. Hung with the wrong person, got her strung on that, heroin, cocaine, sniffing up drugs all in her nose…The ones who watch videos and do what they see as cute as can be, up in the club with fake ID. Careful, before you meet a man with HIV. Whatever you decide, be careful, some men be rapists, so act your age, don’t pretend to be older than you’re. Give yourself time to grow…You are thinking he can give you wealth…”
What does rapper Nas have for clueless boys? He says: “Young boys, you can use a lot of help. You know you’re thinking life’s all about smoking weed and ice. You don’t wanna be my age and can’t read and write, begging different women for a place to sleep at night. Smart boys turn to men and do whatever they wish…”
Need we say more? Power to the youth! We shall return with A Political Coin of Three Sides: What Do We Actually Want??Part llb.