In a society where the laws of the land are broken with impunity, and where discipline is not regarded as a cardinal virtue by the people, the repeal of the criminal libel law has not fully brought about the intended beneficial effect. Complete freedom without discipline and respect for the laws of the land pushes the society towards anarchy.
The foregone are excerpts from Dr. Kwame Addo-Kufuor’s book-Gold Coast Boy- a memoir about life when he was growing up under colonial rule and the moral challenges impeding our development and how to address these.
We could not agree more with a man who has not only served society as a public official but as a doctor and politician who has made important observations about his country.
We should not belabor the point about the factors militating against our development.
Suffice it to, however, point out that these are known and several academic papers have been presented on how to tackle them. For us, however, no matter how much we tackle these as a nation, little or nothing would be achieved when the leadership is faulty and corrupted.
The outgoing political leadership, in spite of the resources at its disposal, is leaving the scene worse than when it took over the reins of administration. This explains how the quality of political leadership can influence the progress or otherwise of a given country.
When the political leadership lacks discipline and breaches the law underpinning the power at its disposal, we can only whinge dejectedly.
Besides the absence of an effective leadership to drive the country to the desired destination, the people themselves must change their attitude towards work and life in general.
Without discipline, we would be stuck in a quagmire unable to move beyond our present location even as others in the other hemispheres make progress and export crumbs to survive on.
As noted by Dr. Addo-Kufuor in the book, impunity has come to characterize the occupation of persons who occupy public office to serve society: service to the people has been altered to mean the contrary because occupants of public offices have made impunity a cornerstone of their tenure.
Such persons have earned for the government, of which they are part, the wrath of the people.
They eventually lose power at the polls – the people having become fed up with their hubris and impunity.
We have come a long way from the day the Union Jack was lowered for the newly independent Ghana that such drawbacks which impede our march towards prosperity should not be countenanced in our body-politics.
It is important that we consider a national moral renewal so that the factors which have kept us stagnant or even retrogressing would be dropped for discipline and a nationalistic spirit.
Institutional and individual indiscipline must give way to disciplined individuals and institutions. These moral drawbacks have become so endemic that every policy rolled out to move the country forward die upon delivery.
The list of evidence, and it includes SADA, GYEEDA and the NHIS among others; the political supervisors of the programmes benefiting monetarily from the mess thereof.
When our laws work, as are our institutions alongside a population nationalistic in spirit we can move mountains.
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