By Francis Kwarteng

“A government or a party gets the people it deserves and sooner or later a people gets the government it deserves” (Frantz Fanon).

THE ROLE OF EDUCATION IN MENTAL COLONIALISM

“To educate the masses politically is to make the totality of the nation a reality to each citizen. It is to make the history of the nation part of the personal experience of its citizens” (Frantz Fanon).

Free education is now the newly trumpeted panacea for all our myriad national problems. Of course, free education has become a homeopathic Midas touch under the new administration.

This is an excellent idea nonetheless, but we also need to ask ourselves this simple question:

What has become of the Unemployed Graduates Association of Ghana (UGAG)?

Maybe this question is not even necessary after all. What is necessary then? We are referring to the kind of education that produces the corrupt and unpatriotic breed of ruling class we have in Ghana today.

The kind of colonial education that, among other things, only leads to a Guggisberg-like learning economy which, in turn, churns out a desert-forest of unthinking spectators of the debilitating national dilemma.

This colonial Guggisberg-like learning economy with its concomitant market economy breeds what Frantz Fanon called “dependency complex.”

At the same time it is this Guggisberg-like learning economy of chew-and-pour or rote-pedagogy that has produced celebrated plagiarists like Eugene Arhin and Akufo-Addo.

It is extremely to know that the latter has now come to terms with the idea of moving away from the Guggisberg economic model of dependency complex.

We should make it clear that what we mean exactly by “the Guggisberg-like learning economy” has nothing to do with any specific institutional character, per se, but rather by the categorical lack or absence of authoritative independence and initiative which the African Academy is expected to enjoy.

Our argument is that the African Academy is merely an appendage to external authority and approval.

Our institutions of learning are so helplessly dependent on external research initiatives and findings, patronage and funding to such an extent that they are incapable of standing alone outside the approving authority of external chaperonage. This is not to attack or reject international efforts in the arena of research activities.

Rather, more often than not some of these research collaborations do not necessarily or directly speak to the immediate resolution of our myriad of problems. This reinforces the notion of dependency complex. Yet we still have the models of the West and emerging economies to learn from.

Rather, the kind of Freirean, Diopian and Nkrumahist education that says citizenship is a radical instrument of independent, confident mindedness, far departing from the kind of education that churns our men and women of first-order emotional buffoonery and spectatorial sychophancy.

Certainly, too, not what Dr. Kofi Kissi Dompere calls “irreducible ignorance” and “cognitive imbecility.”

At the moment Africa cannot boast of an independent mind because it has none. What we have is a mongrel or hybrid of the Eastern-Western mind. It appears we have drifted too far from African-centered critical pedagogy to make sense of our entrenched yet sorry mental colonialism, particularly in the Humanities/Liberal Arts/Social Sciences.

What we need is a productive compromise between the best of the Western and Eastern models of development of against a backcloth of African-centered pedagogy.

The African mind is in effect the property of East-West dichotomy, the African mind itself being remote-controlled by this bloodsucking dichotomy not in the interest of the African but of this dichotomy.

Akufo-Addo is therefore right to make his free-education signature a strategic policy focus of developing the “intellectual property of the mind.” This should not be empty rhetoric as we have seen with almost all our political leaders, save the great Osagyefo Dr. Kwame Nkrumah, a visionary and political powerhouse whose progressive ideals continue to shape events in Ghana, Africa and across the world.

Still, we have to ask this question that has long been a staple on our minds:

What kind of education makes reprobate thieves and political criminals out of an “Honourable” or “His Excellency (H.E.)” in Ghanaian politics?

Day in, day out, we are finding it almost difficult, almost impossible, to ignore the fact that the colonial and unpatriotic education being fed to Ghanaians today make for a tantalizing moral equivalency between armed robbers and our politicians.

Otherwise, what can sufficiently explain or account for the teeming idiots and buffoons we have in parliament, say, thieves and political criminals we respectfully address as “Honourables”?

We have lost US$6 billion, and still counting, since we began exporting oil and yet, it is these idiotic, morally corrupt, and unpatriotic parliamentarians who chose to promote and adopt the Ghana Hybrid System (GHS) over Production Sharing Agreement (PSA).

What sort of education breeds this kind of political criminals and thieves, the same kind of education that churns out lawyers and horse-wig-wearing judges who believe bribery, tubers of yam, goat meat, sex, massage and the like are superior to justice?

Is this the kind of education that the reformed cynic himself, Akufo-Addo promises to sell to our fertile forest of impressionable minds free of charge?

Akufo-Addo is that scheming, pomp billboard that preachifies virtue while practicing vice.

He does not see the glaring moral contradictions between the All-Die-Be-Die hooliganism, vigilantism, and vandalism of his Invisible Forces and his public pronouncements on his supposed uncompromising beliefs in the rule of law and due process.

The shady character is simply a stark status symbol of Orwellian hypocrisy.

Now look at Yaw Osafo-Marfo, Akufo-Addo’s friend. Now also take a close look at Ken Ofori-Atta, Akufo-Addo’s friend and blood relations. Which of these two looks more like the Heritage Fund?

Definitely the ethnocentric hegemonist Yaw Osafo-Marfo!

FOOD FOR THOUGHT: SOME CRITICAL QUESTIONS

Are the children who study under trees “citizens” or “subjects”?

Were those six children who died in that avoidable “deathtrap” which some are calling “classroom” citizens?

Are those children who are forced to study in KVIP-toilets “citizens” or “subjects”?

Are nurses, teachers, national service personnel and other public servants who go months without pay “citizens” or “subjects”?

Are our useless politicians who are always paid on time against the backdrop of humungous ex-gratia payments and awards citizens” or “subjects”?

How can those dead innocent children and loudmouth Kennedy Agyapong, perhaps Ghana’s foremost political buffoon, share in the same citizenship of the same progressive unitary nation-state?

How could Akufo-Addo have been part of the institutionalization of the Ghana Hybrid System?

Does Akufo-Addo’s “All-Die-Be-Die” and “Yen Akanfuo” make him a “citizen” or “subject”?

Does Kennedy Agyapong’s reported genocidal pronouncement to the effect that “Akans (Asantes) should massacre Gas and Ewes” make him a “citizen” or “subject”?

Does Montie 3’s threat to “kill and rape judges” make them “citizens” or “judges”?

Does Abdulai Naaba, Collins Dauda’s brother’s statement that “I kill people every day” make him a “citizen” or “subject”?

And, are our thieving political criminals, who are always on open display of material extravagance, also “citizens” or “subjects”?

We shall return…