Lord Kissi-Mensah

The letter ‘s’ begins most words in the English language. Naturally, if a word was to engage the atten­tion of a lot of people, one would have expected it to be a word beginning with letter ‘s’ and not letter ‘k’. If there is one word that is going viral on social media at the moment, one can safely bet it is Kakistocracy. The reason for the popularity of the word Kakistocracy, has to do with the perception of leadership failure that seems to have crippled our developmental effort as a nation.

According to the Oxford English Dic­tionary, Kakistocracy is a noun defined as government by the least suitable or competent citizens of the state. Com­ments in the media space, especially on social media circles or platform suggest that our leaders are incompetent and that we have elected people who are least qualified. I, however, disagree vehemently with this assertion. I do accept that the first Republic had some challenges with people in leadership positions who can be classified as least qualified.

There is this funny story of one of such people who was very close to our first President, Dr Kwame Nkrumah, who when asked about the meaning of socialism said “it means ‘Di bi ma me ni bi’” The same cannot be said of the leaders we have had in the second Re­public up to the current Fourth Repub­lic. Leaders since the second Republic had been well educated, intelligent and very qualified. Hence our slow pace of development as a nation, in my hum­ble opinion, cannot be attributed to a lack of qualified leaders and therefore kakistocracy.

If the problem is not due to kakistoc­racy then why are we where we are, 66 years after independence? Currently, we are at the International Monetary Fund (IMF) seeking bail out for the 17th time, our inflation is above 40 per cent, interest rate is hovering around 29 per cent, debt to GDP is about 93 per cent, bondholders are in a tug of war with government and there is general sense of hopelessness across the country.

The reason for the state of affairs in our country, in my candid opinion can be summed up in three words; lack of mo­rality. We have asked God to stay away from our lives and that we can handle our own affairs I believe. He has stayed in his corner and allowed us to lead our own lives as a people. Now see where that has got us. There is an urgent need to infuse morality in every facet of our lives as a nation otherwise we can for­get it as my Canadian friend would say.

Morality according to the Oxford Dictionary is defined as principles con­cerning the distinction between right and wrong or good and bad behaviour. There is an urgent need for all of us as Ghanaians to develop a moral conscious­ness in order to deal with kakistocracy since the leaders are voted into power from amongst us.

Faith-based organisations constitutes over 90 percent of our population so why should corruption be a challenge for this country if we claim we are Christians or Muslims? If we want to achieve the Vision of Ghana Beyond Aid then we need to have a change of mindset.

We are corrupting the youth right from the Junior High School (JHS) level and if we are not careful, we shall soon create a bunch or should I say an army of intelligent but criminally-minded youth. It is common knowledge that proprietors of some private schools, acquire examination papers beforehand and give to their teachers to use to teach the students so they can easily pass the Basic Education Certificate Examination (BECE) . A taxi driver who was driving me to the West Hills Mall some time ago was lamenting to me how he was being asked to pay GH¢2,000.00 by the school his child attends, appar­ently for such purpose and was worried about his financial situation at the time but more importantly about the danger that practice poses to the mindset of the children going forward.

Since we are on morality, let us talk about hypocrisy. We easily point accus­ing fingers at politicians that they are thieves and every unsavoury comment you can think of, yet we fail to notice the beam in our eyes as Jesus preached. The Food and Drugs Authority (FDA) has established that market women adul­terate palm oil to make it look more reddish and increase the volume for more profit.

We hear of civil servants asking for ‘weights’ to be placed on documents before they are processed. Pastors pay bribes to get admissions for their wards into Class A schools, police still col­lect bribes on our roads, Chiefs collect money and turn a blind eye on Galamsey activities resulting in serious environ­mental degradation, I can go on and on.

Recently, a former President who is infamously known in Ghana as Govern­ment Official 1, for the role he played in a bribery scheme during the purchase of Air Crafts for Ghana’s military, had the guts to speak against the current gov­ernment when a minister kept a huge amount of money in her house instead of keeping it in the bank.

This is the height of hypocrisy and un­til we admit that we are all part of the problem and there is a need for an atti­tudinal change, we can never become a country beyond aid.

The Average Citizen