Ghana, a failing state?
Like democracy, a “failed/failing state” may have more meanings than one; so many, indeed, that its use may be limited by the pictures on the mind of the user. For me, it is a country where the laws exist only on paper — something close to a Banana Republic in one sense or another.
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In a failed/failing state, sin (or crime) is pleasurable because it is profitable; profitable because it is not punishable. In a failed state, you get punished only because you have no patrons or godfathers. In Ghana, you get punished only because you are foolish enough not to remember to flash your party ID, especially if you can prove you are NPP or NDC.
In a failed state, the Public Utilities and Regulatory Commission ( PURC) can disregard a Presidential fiat and go ahead to spend GH¢100,000.00 on Christmas hampers (per the Auditor General’s Report), in a country where the production and distribution of utilities are a challenge. Where they are available, they are unaffordable. I am talking about a country where a company’s electricity bill has quadrupled because of the recent tariff hikes. It is in such a state that the PURC’s GH¢100,000.00 becomes an issue.
Did the death of Atta Mills signal the death of the Christmas Hampers decree? Whatever one’s answer may be, the next question to answer is: Does that expenditure make sense? Has the PURC ceased to have social conscience?
Spending so much on hampers is not necessarily the sign of failure. A failed state is when such a socially reprehensible act can be committed in the confidence that “no-one can do anything” or that “no-one will be punished for it”. It breeds, or it is called, impunity
A failed state is when a President orders his Attorney-General and Minister of Finance not to pay a certain judgement debt and yet, even in the life of the self-same President, the debt gets paid. And yet, up to the time of writing, nobody has asked for public explanations from the then Attorney-General or Minister of Finance. It breeds impunity, a recipe for disobedience by the “other ranks” of society.
In a failed state, a district or metropolitan assembly can buy hundreds of computer monitors when it does not have a CPU or a keyboard! It is possible because nobody makes any effort to trace the problem to the source; that is, to question who originated the expenditure in the first place. It will always be done because the worst that can happen is to blame the “Assembly”, not the human being. Nobody questions the M/DCE because by the time the report comes out, he/she would have been out of office. In a state that has failed or is failing the people, being out of office will not be an excuse: unless the offending public servant or politician is dead, he/she will be called to account. Not in Ghana!
Nothing will ever happen – they know it. They also know that the Public Accounts Committee of Parliament will sit and its hearings will be live on GTV. There will be a lot of hue and cry, but that is about it. They know Ghana; they know that after two weeks, it will blow over. No one will be prosecuted; no one will go to prison.
It is only in a failed state that a company will be paid in full for a contract it has not started. With that type of capital, who cannot succeed?
In a failed state or a state about to fail, the Chinese can come into the country, take over the land, carry on illegal mining, pollute water bodies with mercuric poisons and suffer nothing but deportation at the worst. Who will not get bolder and bolder when the state seems so helpless against Ghanaian galamseyers? Rawlings waged war against galamsey in the early days of the Revolution and succeeded. Do we need a revolution to decide to push the military into those concessions to protect the interest of investors?
What signals are we sending out to potential investors: That we have become a Banana Republic where anybody can get up any day and jump onto legitimately acquired investment? What does it say for Ghana as a safe haven for investors?
In a failed state, the people are reduced (or reduce themselves) to the level of sub-humans: What other description fits a people who buy cooked food sold close to a public toilet overflowing with excreta, worms and slime – not to talk about the smell of putrefaction? We not only buy from that spot: we actually eat it on the spot.
Dear reader, I pause here knowing that you can continue the list. We are failing the people of Ghana. Ghana is becoming a failed state.
What is frightening about our situation is that it is happening in a country where the mosques are filled to capacity on Friday and millions of Christians listen to mind-changing sermons in church on Sunday. Every Friday and every Sunday, we vow (like new year resolution at 31st December watch-night) to drop off all sins.
A failed state is like the man in the Christian Bible who is described in James 1:23 as “a man who looks intently at his natural face in a mirror… goes away and at once forgets how he looks like”.
How can he ever take the first step for the necessary corrective measures to make his face look good?