Features
Corruption and hypocrisy (Part 2)
Hypocrisy is what is destroying this country. Most Ghanaians, accuse other people for the problems of this country except themselves. If we cast our minds to the early days and weeks of the Covid-19 era, we recall the general hikes in prices of items.
The increase in prices of items that are produced outside the country can be justified due to freight charges that had increased astronomically within a short period. What is ridiculous and can never be justified are the prices of food items like gari and beans which are produced in Ghana. The price of an ‘Olonka’of gari doubled all of a sudden and even tripled at some market places.
A story is told of a lady who had gone to buy a few bags of rice from a distributor shop with a budget of GH¢300 per bag. The owner of the shop, informed her that one of his customers had just bought the last batch from him so she should go there since it was not very far from his shop.
Not long afterwards, the woman returned to the distributor’s shop complaining to him as to why he had increased the prices so much that the lady was selling to her at GH¢700 per bag.
The distributor became angry and informed her that he was going to get back his rice because the woman who came for the last batch was very greedy and that he gave them to her at GH¢300 per bag on credit. Is such price hikes the fault of the President?
I am very sure that this lady is either a Christian or a Muslim, since these two groups form the majority of the population in Ghana. We make Christianity unattractive to unbelievers.
The Bible speaks against greediness and although I am not very familiar with the Quran, I am sure it says the same and therefore this makes the behaviour of this greedy woman despicable.
Should this woman be caught in a traffic offence and an unpatriotic policeman extort money from her, I can imagine her hypocritically ranting about the level of corruption in the Ghana police service, conveniently ignoring her spiritual corruption regarding her greediness.
Most Ghanaians who are public and civil servants can be said to be magicians. If you look at the salaries they receive and their expenditure, that is the conclusion you will arrive at. If you ask them how they manage to survive, they claim hypocritically, “it is by the grace of God.”
Meanwhile, they know very well that it is by their own scheming. There are those who take money before they fast-track processing of documents, those who are involved in taking bribes to help importers cheat the government, policemen on our roads on a routine daily ritual of extortion, market women reducing the volume of various measuring containers used in selling food items like gari, rice through various disingenuous ways; the list is endless.
We are all eager to see our country develop to the status of countries like South Korea and Singapore who were our co-equals in the late 50’s to early 60’s but are way out of our league now.
A characteristic which are absent in those countries are corruption and hypocrisy.
These are unhealthy attitudes that using computer terminology, must be deleted from our lives in every sphere of endeavour as a nation to ensure our growth and therefore development to move from Ghana begging for aid to a Ghana beyond aid.
Hypocrisy makes us erroneously believe that we are not the problem but it is the other person.
By Laud Kissi-Mensah
One of the issues we have been grappling with as a nation is corruption, and it has had such a devastating effect on our national development. I have been convinced that until morality becomes the foundation upon which our governance system is built, we can never go forward as a nation.
Our traditional practices, which have shaped our cultural beliefs, have always espoused values that have kept us along the straight and the narrow and have preserved our societies since ancient times.
These are values that frown on negative habits like stealing, cheating, greediness, selfishness, etc. Our grandparents have told us stories of societies where stealing was regarded as so shameful that offenders, when caught, have on a number of instances committed suicide.
In fact, my mother told me of a story where a man who was living in the same village as her mother (my grandmother), after having been caught stealing a neighbour’s cockerel, out of shame committed suicide on a mango tree. Those were the days that shameful acts were an abomination.
Tegare worship, a traditional spiritual worship during which the spirit possesses the Tegare Priest and begins to reveal secrets, was one of the means by which the society upheld African values in the days of my grandmother and the early childhood days of my mother.
Those were the days when the fear of being killed by Tegare prevented people from engaging in anti-social vices. These days, people sleeping with other people’s wives are not uncommon.
These wrongful behaviour was not countenanced at all by Tegare. One was likely going to lose his life on days that Tegare operates, and so unhealthy habits like coveting your neighbour’s wife was a taboo.
Stealing of other people’s farm produce, for instance, could mean certain death or incapacitation of the whole or part of the body in the full glare of everybody. People realised that there were consequences for wrongdoing, and this went a long way to motivate the society to adhere to right values.
Imagine a President being sworn into office and whoever administers the oath says, “Please say this after me: I, Mr. …., do solemnly swear by God, the spirits of my ancestors and the spirits ruling in Ghana, that should I engage in corrupt acts, may I and my family become crippled, may madness become entrenched in my family, may incurable sicknesses and diseases be my portion and that of my family, both immediate and extended.”
Can you imagine a situation where a few weeks afterwards the President goes to engage in corrupt acts and we hear of his sudden demise or incapacitation and confessing that he engaged in corrupt acts before passing or before the incapacitation—and the effect it will have on his successor? I believe we have to critically examine this option to curb corruption.
My grandmother gave me an eyewitness account of one such encounter where a woman died instantly after the Tegare Priest had revealed a wrong attitude she had displayed during the performance on one of the days scheduled for Tegare spirit manifestation.
According to her story, the Priest, after he had been possessed by the spirit, declared that for what the woman had done, he would not forgive her and that he would kill. Instantly, according to my grandmother, the lady fell down suddenly and she died—just like what happened to Ananias and his wife Sapphira in Acts Chapter 5.
NB: ‘CHANGE KOTOKA INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT TO KOFI BAAKO
By Laud Kissi-Mensah
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BY ROBERT EKOW GRIMMOND-THOMPSON
