One of the poets whose works I have come to cherish is the Laureate of the 2013 NSK Neustadt Price for Children’s Literature, the Arab American Naomi Shihab Nye. On the dreadful September 11, 2011, she related that she was with teenagers at the Wonderful Holland Hall School in Tulsa when the planes flew into the various buildings in the US of A, and they were just talking about words as ways to imagine one another’s experience. Just after the hijacking incident happened, one of the boys asked her “do you think you will write about it”?
She responded feeling sick and her head spinning “it would not be my choice of topic, but as writers, we are always exploring what happens, what comes next, turning it over, finding words to sit in like chairs, even in terrible scenery, so maybe I will have to write about it; maybe we all will. Because words shape the things that we live, whether beautiful or sorrowful, and help us to connect to one another…….”
After my second published article as a young and upcoming writer, “the life-changing prisoners and the time-wasting youth’, I have searched frantically for something to write about, explored to find out what happens so that I can turn it over and find words to sit in like chairs. Then, “Eureka”! the planned demonstration I was to take part in but absent due to a lecturer’s demand of his trustworthy class representative, hit the country as “Nima Youth clash with police, defy order to suspend demonstration over stalled project” (source, myjoyonline) gave me something deep and profound to write about.
The demonstration as stated in the letter given me as the secretary of Since Morning, a youth organization, “is to awaken, inform and sensitize the community on the stoppage of work on the Nima/Maamobi Drainage.” Unfortunately, it led to a clash because the police stated that the youth were not given a permit. Funny! (When we demand our rights, they say permit, but do the politicians go for permit before they embezzle our funds)?
The clash (as reported) that the Nima youth had with the police as a result of the latter’s instruction of the former to halt the demonstration. To halt a demonstration of the injustice meted out to them by the stoppage of work on the malodorously-stinking gutter that has been left unattended to by whomever in charge? That is serious!
The clash is sour to the tongue and unpleasant to the ear. It should not have come to that in the first place. However as stated by our first President and perhaps the real politician this country has ever had in a speech he delivered at the Positive Action Conference for Peace and Security in Africa in Accra on April 7, 1960, “No man willed this situation and no man can stem the tide or divert the winds of change. We decry violence and deplore it…….. Experience has shown that when change is too long delayed or stubbornly resisted, violence will erupt here and there- not because men planned it and willed it- but because the accumulated grievance of the past erupt with volcanic fury”, the youth will definitely not countenance any albatross to them venting their spleen. And any attempt to do that will absolutely result in an altercation. Of course, the longer the oppression, the more dangerous and explosive becomes the situation.
Ayawaso East has been taken for a ride for a very long time by all the successive governments of the Fourth republic. This is manifested in the poor and ramshackle state of affairs in the constituency. The problem is exacerbated by some praise singing “Uncle Toms’ who parade themselves as the all in all of politics in the world, yet are the bane of the constituency. Their actions depict Hans Christian Andersen’s story “The Emperor’s New Clothes”. A story that demonstrates how damaging a clique of sycophants and praise-singers can be. Their failure as leaders (titular leaders they are) to effectively represent their people when dealing with the authorities in charge is the single factor that rustles the development nest of our constituency.
I seriously support any action taken by the youth to address their grievance so far as it is not lethal. Our politicians are gradually draining the country with no service for humanity on their minds. It’s of no wonder that instead of making the number of hospitals built, the quality of schools constructed, amount of potable water provided, how the capacity building of citizens has been boosted etc. as the yardstick for success in politics, one dolt of a minister decides one million dollars to be hers.
For the past three weeks, access to water has become ‘Hajj” as people “travel’ long distances just to fetch water in East Ayawaso. It is only in East Ayawaso where public toilets blast in this break-neck developing 21st century. It is heart-wrenching for this to happen in these modern times when even in the 1960’s, the world had moved astronomically past this.
Bob Hope dramatized how the world had moved in as early the 1960’s by saying “if, on taking off on a nonstop flight from Los Angeles to New York City, you develop hiccups, he said, you will hic in Los Angeles and cup in New York City. That is really moving. If you take a flight from Tokyo, Japan, on Sunday morning, you will arrive in Seattle, Washington, on the preceding Saturday night. When your friends meet you at the airport and ask you when you left Tokyo, you will have to say ‘I left tomorrow’. Try to appreciate and understand that!
That was the extent of development of the world in the 1960’s yet we in Ghana more specifically East Ayawaso live in an analog state in a digital age due to the liars, sophistry, empty promises, bootlicking and other repugnant political acts that have become the order of the day..
The demonstration, in whichever way it was planned shows that there is a rude-awakening looming and it’s going to brutal. The bad ones have been in the system for so long and the youth will chase them away. The drainage system has taken centuries to be constructed and we can’t wait anymore.
It was Ben Franklin who said “Geese are geese thou we may think them Swans, and truth will be truth though it sometimes proves to be mortifying and distasteful.” No matter how mortifying or distasteful it is, the truth must be told that the politicians are dilly-dallying with our lives in East Ayawaso Constituency and the more it lasts, the more explosive the situation becomes.
Inusah Mohammed (Maazi Okoro)
NB: The writer is a student of the University of Professional Studies, Accra.
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