Feature Article of Friday, 28 January 2011
http://www.ghanaweb.com/GhanaHomePage/NewsArchive/artikel.php?ID=202038
Steady your nerves today for a bone-jarring and truly bumpy ride
across treacherous terrain and while you are about it, old chap, keep
your helmet on tight, because all manner of pebbles and jagged stones
might come flying our way when we arrive breathless.
Rocking the canoe. Upsetting the cart. Stirring up the killer beehive.
Apt expressions that vividly illustrate what I am about to do: It
might well upset the status quo and various elements in society who
are content with living a big lie.
The irony is that I am myself pretty much upset about the issues
domestic and regional, that I shall raise. To begin with, I submit
that the republic is living a big, fat lie and putting up appearances
when it comes to the complementary values required for building a
progressive and prosperous society.
This culture of living a lie and putting up appearances threatens to
saddle our mighty nation with future generations of popcorn
personalities pretending to be what they are not.
If we insist on living this lie, other nations which are nursing
citizenries of creative minds in order to continually break new
grounds in discovery, invention and profound, original thinking will
stay ahead of us all the time:
That is why although it might earn us loads of resentment and possible
abuse, we still need to stop dead in their tracks before it too late,
those gate-crashers in world of thought and scholarship, whose own
pretence threatens to influence and dilute the future quality and
integrity of our human resource capital.
In Ghana many people bearing titles like businessman, Dr., CEO,
Prophet, Managing Director, bishop etc are anything but any of these.
Someone wants to be an evangelist, a real Jesus man of the hallowed
pulpit and what does he do, Jomo? Does he do a triple check to
establish that he does indeed have a truly divine calling? Does he
then set out to go through the many years of pastoral training that a
minister must undergo?
Nah, he just jumps into some clerical robes brandishing an obese Bible
and hey presto, he is a bishop straightaway. The media immediately
substitute the honourable title of bishop for the words "swindling
pervert" and report his activities in headlines that do great
injustice to the integrity of Ghana's clergy.
Someone fancies public recognition as a scholar and an intellectual
but neglects to take the painful but necessary and ultimately
rewarding path that leads to scholarship. All the same he is a scholar
and an intellectual in one swell swoop because he says so and who is
to contradict him?
If folks investigated the rigorous personal discipline and extended
years of extremely hard work and grueling academic study that leads to
a PhD in the best universities, they might think twice about monkeying
around with the meaning of scholarship.
Knowledge is universal and that means aspiring African scholars will
have to continue to study, cite and quote Western scholars if their
work is to be accepted as true work of scholarship for the award of
degrees and for publication.
It is a fact of history that now appears to have intellectually
enslaved African scholars to the point where we fear to question long-
held and existing philosophical and academic arguments and assumptions
espoused by Western scholars over the centuries
Someone I resume to be a scholar sent me an email the other time
pointing out what he said was my wrong use of the expression "daylight
robbery" to describe the refusal of the Social Security and National
Insurance Trust to pay me my pension contribution last year.
I ignored his mail but he persisted until I posted him a response to
the effect that the existence of the English language expression
"daylight robbery" in the context in which HE was using it, did not
mean a robbery cannot occur in broad daylight and be rightly described
as such.
Imagine a scholar who is so enslaved by his education that he believes
the existence of the English language expression "daylight robbery' to
describe cut-throat overpricing of goods and services, makes it wrong
for me adapt a figurative use of the literal meaning of the phrase to
describe the case of someone withholding money that is rightfully
mine!
Read newspapers, books and magazines from across Africa and you will
notice how African writers and scholars are always copiously quoting
Western thinkers, philosophers and scholars to impress others about
their own outstanding scholarship.
There appears to be an acute shortage of Africans ever worthy of
quote, except perhaps for occasional references to Africans like
Mandela and Westerners of African decent like Martin Luther King,
Marcus Garvey and a few others.
If African scholars, real or only self-perceived, keep quoting only
Western scholars and thinkers as frequently and as copiously as they
do, without generating creative ideas of their own which can add to
universal knowledge, who is take responsibility for generating new
perspectives on the ideas they keep quoting?
I also find it upsetting that originality in the various creative
pursuits of our society, is all but dead, that is if it ever it ever
lived. There is total obsession with imitating and copying everything
with a Western label on it:
The football club in the republic today that does not bear the name of
an English League club instead of a Ghanaian name, is the perhaps the
exception.
Folks say African movies but especially Ghanaian and Nigerian films
pack so much pornography, violence and superstition, familiar features
of many Western movies, except perhaps for the third. To make Africa's
propensity for imitation and copying of all and everything complete,
the industry in Nigeria has to be Nollywood and that in Ghana
Ghalleywood. What embarrassing nonsense is this, Jomo?
On and off stage, from ear rings, sunglasses, singing voice mode, hand
gestures, every young musician in town is trying to look and sound
every bit like the gangster rapper from the Bronx.
If there is any other issue which has upset me, Jomo, it is La Cote
D'Ivoire: In about 48 hours, the African Union will be meeting in
Addis Ababa and the Ivorian crisis will no doubt be top of the agenda.
It has now emerged that "the use of force" to oust Laurent Gbagbo is
not necessarily a reference to a military invasion of the Ivory Coast.
The steps that are already being taken to force out Gbagbo just might
work or will they? Since the start of the crisis, Gbagbo has been
withdrawing huge sums of cash from Central Bank of West Africa only
because Philippe-Henri Dacoury-Tabley, the Ivoirian governor of the
bank, had been approving payments to Gbagbo in contravention of
sanctions against Gbagabo's regime. Now Ouattara has had Tabley
sacked, so no more cash for Gbagabo from the CBWA.
The European Union has also announced sanctions against the Gbagbo
regime and asked member states of the union not to purchase cocoa from
the Ivory Coast. That will mean a further loss of tens of millions of
dollars in taxes and tariffs that would have been paid to the Gbagbo
regime.
If these and other sanctions can be enforced by a UN naval security
block around the ivory coast and Western powers working for peace in
La Cote D'Iovite take appropriate measures to bring some economic
relief to cocoa farmers and Ivoirians who will be hit by the
sanctions, the pressure on Gbagbo might build up to breaking point, or
will it?
Email: georgeabu@hotmail.com
Website: www.sydneyabugri.com
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